A Cure For HIV?

One of the most difficult enigma's for medical researches has been the idea of curing HIV.  This strain of viral infection is very unexplored and profoundly difficult to control, yet alone cure.   In fact, until recently, no one has ever been titled as being cured of HIV.  This all changed thanks to one patient in Berlin and his brilliant doctor.  He was suffering from both leukemia and HIV, but cancer was actually a gift rather than a curse.  Both HIV and cancer consist of viral characteristic, making cancer treatments, like chemotherapy, effect both illnesses.   The patient's doctor, Gero Hutter, came up with the remarkable idea of trying to cure his patient of both illnesses at the same time.  Normally with chemotherapy, one must receive donor stem cells to replace the killed ones.  Hutter decided, instead of replacing the killed off cancer-infected stem cells with regular donor cells, why not replace them with a mutated stem cell called CCR5delta32?  This strand of cell is mutated from original stem cells and is incapable of being affected by HIV.  It lacks the door way for the disease to enter.  So thats what Hutter did.  He found a donor with this rare mutation and implanted it into his patient to repopulate his immune system.  This method worked and Hutters patient was the first person to ever be cured of HIV in the whole entire world.  

So you ask, why did this method work? There are three reasons that all equally caused the outcome.  First was that chemotherapy killed most of the HIV infected cells.  By intself, this would not have been enough to cure HIV.  Next, the donors cells repopulated his immune system.  These cells killed off all of the patients remaining white blood cells after chemotherapy.  Third  was their capability to withstand HIV.  As HIV emerged from resting cells, the virus helped kill off all the remaining susceptible.  When the new donor cells expanded to take their place, the HIV had no place to go and withered away.

This event has caused researchers to look at HIV in a completely different way.  Originally thought to be not capable of being cured, the virus has proven to be stoppable.  "In the future there will be a mild method of making space for these new HIV-resistant stem cells, so that they grow out and repopulate the immune system," one researcher says, "that is the goal. It may take a long time to get to that, but it will happen."  So yes, there is hope for HIV victims.  A cure is just waiting to emerge.