Doctors in Barcelona are optimistic they have found cure against HIV by means of blood transplants from umbilical cords of people whose genes are resistant of the virus. According to the doctors, the procedure was able to cure a Barcelona HIV patient in just a matter of three months. The procedure will undergo world's first clinical trials by March 2015.

 

For five years, a Barcelona man positive of HIV started receiving umbilical cord blood transfusion. Along the course of the treatment, the patient developed lymphoma. The doctors then tried treating the patient's blood cell tumours with chemotherapy and cell transplants. Taking the case of Berlin Patient Timothy Ray Brown as the precedent, the Barcelona doctors then gave the patient blood transplant from an umbilical cord of a donor who had genetic mutation.  Brown is the only one person to have ever been cured of HIV when he received bone marrow transplants as treatment for his leukaemia. Brown received bone marrow from a donor who is resistant of HIV.

 

"We suggested a transplant of blood from an umbilical cord from someone who had the mutation because we knew from Berlin patient that as well as [ending] the cancer, we could also eradicate HIV," Rafael Duarte, the director of the Haematopoietic Transplant Programme at the Catalan Oncology Institute in Barcelona, said as quoted by the Latino Post.

 

Three months after the umbilical cord blood transfusion, the patient was completely free of the HIV virus. However, he died of the lymphoma several months after. Nevertheless, the case of the Barcelona patient paves the way for doctors to be optimistic that they have chanced upon a cure for HIV and could develop the discovery to formulate a more precise HIV cure in the future.

 

What the Barcelona doctors discovered was very much similar to what French scientists found about the genetic mechanism of two HIV positive men who were spontaneously cured of the virus. The scientists conclude the spontaneous cure was caused by a common enzyme named APOBEC and by the process they now called endogenisation.

 

Endogenisation is a process where the persistence of HIV DNA in an HIV positive individual will develop the cure and protection from HIV rather than worsening the HIV virus in the blood. "These finding suggest that without therapeutic and prophylactic strategies, after several decades of HIV/host integrations and millions of deaths, it is likely that a few individuals might have endogenised and neutralised the virus and transmitted it to their progeny," the scientist wrote in the journal Clinical Microbiology and Infection.

 

 

 

http://au.ibtimes.com/articles/572426/20141112/hiv-treatment-news-cure-medication.htm#.VGr5a5GTuih 

 

 

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