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Title    Closer to the Riddle of the 'Berlin Patient' that Rid Himself of HIV
Date    Wednesday October 01 2014, @07:05PM
Author    LaminatorX
Topic   
from the resistance-is-fruitful dept.
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/10/01/1115225

kaszz writes:

Researchers are closer to unraveling the mystery of how Timothy Ray Brown, the only human cured of HIV, defeated the virus, according to a new study. Although the work doesn't provide a definitive answer, it rules out one possible explanation.

Researchers point to three different factors that could independently or in combination have rid Brown’s body of HIV. The first is the process of conditioning, in which doctors destroyed Brown’s own immune system with chemotherapy and whole body irradiation to prepare him for his bone marrow transplant.

His oncologist, Gero Hütter, who was then with the Free University of Berlin, also took an extra step that he thought might not only cure the leukemia but also help rid Brown’s body of HIV. He found a bone marrow donor who had a rare mutation in a gene that cripples a key receptor on white blood cells the virus uses to establish an infection. (For years, researchers referred to Brown as "the Berlin patient.")

The third possibility is his new immune system attacked remnants of his old one that held HIV-infected cells, a process known as graft versus host disease.

Links

  1. "kaszz" - https://soylentnews.org/~kaszz/
  2. "unraveling the mystery of how Timothy Ray Brown, the only human cured of HIV, defeated the virus" - http://news.sciencemag.org/health/2014/09/how-did-berlin-patient-rid-himself-hiv
  3. "a new study" - http://www.plospathogens.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.ppat.1004406

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