HIV Patient Achieves Remission After Groundbreaking Bone Marrow Transplant in France

 An HIV patient is in remission after a bone marrow transplant from a donor performed in 2020, public hospitals in Marseille (southern France) announced on Friday, indicating that this case would be the first in France and the eighth in the world, Agerpres reports.

The patient, aged around 60 and diagnosed as HIV-positive in 1999, “developed acute myeloid leukemia in 2020,” Marseille public hospitals explained in a statement.

In July 2020, she received an allogeneic bone marrow transplant from a donor who "presented a rare genetic mutation (Delta 32) on the CCR5 gene, preventing HIV from entering cells," according to the cited sources.

After this allograft, which made it possible to treat leukemia, "the patient continued her antiretroviral treatment for three years," until October 2023.

"Other" virological examinations were carried out, including "ultrasensitive viral load tests", "viral culture tests" and "a search for pro-viral DNA corresponding to the possible reservoir of the virus" still present in the patient's body, and "all these tests proved negative", detailed the public hospitals in Marseille.

However, they state that this case cannot be "generalized to all patients affected by HIV due to the difficulty of treatments associated with allografts."

However, it "opens new perspectives for research on the virus," the hospitals say.

Seven similar cases with an allogeneic bone marrow transplant have so far been "reported worldwide" and for six of them, "the donor was a carrier of the Delta 32 mutation on the CCR5 receptor."

These cases of remission observed around the world in recent years represent a certainly spectacular development, but they involve risky operations, which are only possible in very specific cases, the researchers remind.

Around the world, the fight against HIV and AIDS is progressing, even though the end of the epidemic remains far away.

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infections fell to a historic low in 2023, between one million and 1.7 million, according to the annual report published in November by the UNAIDS agency.