A 42-year-old man with HIV has been cured of the infection by a blood cell transplant, it is claimed.
Timothy Brown, an American living in Berlin, underwent the procedure to treat leukaemia in 2007.
His donor was both a good blood match and also had a gene mutation that confers natural resistance to HIV.
It involves destroying the person's native immune system with powerful drugs and radiation, then replacing it with donor cells to grow a new immune system.
Antibodies that are ineffective or disable just a couple of HIV strains are common. Now researchers have revealed three powerful antibodies have been discovered. Writing in the journal Science today, they said that one of them neutralised 91 per cent of HIV strains.
A 42-year-old HIV-infected man living in Germany has been cured according to an American medical journal.
Blood, the journal of the American Society of Haematology, says doctors believe Timothy Ray Brown has been cured of HIV after receiving a stem cell transplant in 2007.
If Mr Brown has been cured, it points the way towards developing a cure for HIV/Aids infection through genetically engineered stem cells.
That study found "the patient remained without viral rebound 20 months after transplantation and discontinuation of antiretroviral therapy."
"The new cells have a natural resistance against HIV."
Three years ago, Timothy Ray Brown had been an HIV-positive leukemia patient. Prior to receiving the stem cell transplant, he underwent intense chemotherapy to completely replace his immune system.
At the time Huetter specifically was looking for bone marrow stem cell donors that contained the rare CCR5 deletion.
Since his treatment, the so-called "Berlin patient" has been effectively cured of AIDS and its disease-causing virus, HIV, but also leukemia. An "intriguing" step, AIDS researchers say
In the wake of the new German paper, AIDS and HIV researchers around the world are starting to take stock of this important finding.
"It's intriguing that this patient does not have a rebound of the HIV replication," said Jens Lundgren, an AIDS researcher and professor at the University of Copenhagen, in an interview with Deutsche Welle. "It seems that so far, this patient is one that we could call cured from HIV," he said.
