Norwegian Man's HIV Infection Eradicated Thanks to Life-Saving Transplant from Sibling Donor

n n

Stock image

n

A Norwegian man has been effectively cured of HIV after receiving a stem cell transplant from his brother, doctors announced on Monday.

n

The patient’s brother happened to carry a rare, virus-blocking genetic mutation.

n

The 63-year-old man, dubbed the “Oslo patient”, is the latest in around 10 people worldwide who have gone into long-term remission from HIV after receiving a transplant to treat unrelated blood cancer.

n

The high-risk procedure normally requires a donor to have a specific mutation of their CCR5 gene, which blocks HIV from entering the body’s cells.

n

Only around one percent of people in northern Europe have the necessary mutation.

n

The Oslo patient, who had been living with HIV since 2006, was diagnosed with a fatal blood cancer called myelodysplastic syndrome in 2017.

n

His doctors searched for a donor who would help treat both. When they couldn’t find one, they chose the man’s elder brother.

n

However, on the day of the transplant in 2020, the doctors were stunned to discover that the brother carried the CCR5 mutation.

n

“We had no idea… That was amazing,” doctor Anders Eivind Myhre of the Oslo University Hospital told AFP.

n

‘Winning the lottery twice’

n

The patient said “it was like winning the lottery twice”, added Myhre, who was also the lead author of a study describing the case in Nature Microbiology.

n

Two years after the transplant, the patient stopped taking the anti-retroviral drugs which had been reducing the level of HIV in his body.

n

The researchers found no trace of the virus in samples of the man’s blood, gut and bone marrow.

n

“For all practical purposes, we are quite certain that he is cured,” Myhre said.

n

Now the Oslo patient, whose name was not revealed, is “having a great time” and has more energy than he knows what to do with, Myhre said.

n

The painful and potentially dangerous transplant procedure is for people who have both HIV and deadly blood cancer so is not a feasible option for the millions of people living with the virus across the world.

n

However, researchers believe that studying these rare cases will reveal more about how HIV works in the hope of finding a cure for all patients.

n

‘No longer a patient’

n

The Oslo patient is the first person to receive a transplant from a family member.

n

The patient’s immune system had been “completely replaced” by the donor’s, sqaid study co-author Marius Troseid of the University of Oslo.

n

It was the first time this had been observed in a cured patient’s bone marrow and gut, he told AFP.

n

Even before the researchers found out the brother had a CCR5 mutation, they had some hope that the Oslo patient’s HIV could be cured.

n

That is because in 2024 it was revealed that the so-called “next Berlin patient” entered long-term remission despite receiving a transplant that did not have two copies of the mutated gene.

n

The original Berlin patient, Timothy Ray Brown, was the first person declared cured of HIV back in 2008. Patients in London, New York, Geneva, Duesseldorf and elsewhere followed.

n

Given the Oslo patient’s robust health, Troseid suggested that his nickname was no longer suitable.

n

“The Oslo patient is perhaps no longer a patient. At least he doesn’t feel like it,” Troseid said.

n n