World’s third HIV patient cured by stem cell therapy

France: Every year, 3.5 million people worldwide die from HIV and AIDS, and now the third patient in the world has been completely cured by stem cell therapy.

This patient is called a ‘Düsseldorf patient’. Interestingly, the patient was suffering from leukemia (blood cancer) and he has also recovered from this disease.

Earlier, the two patients who were cured of cancer and HIV at the same time have been named the Berlin patient and the London patient respectively. However, upon the recovery of the first and second patient, critics called this therapy high risk.

Doctors have not released the name of the 53-year-old man, who had been suffering from HIV since 2008 and had been suffering from myeloid leukemia, a deadly blood cancer, for the past three years. Then in 2013, bone marrow was taken from a woman and transplanted into this man. The fetus had a naturally occurring CCR5 genetic mutation.

With this genetic change, HIV cannot infect cells and gradually the same thing happened to the patient and now after many years he has been declared completely cured of the deadly disease. In his statement, the patient thanked the team of doctors and expressed his pride in this work.

‘I am happy that I am free from two diseases at once, cancer and HIV,’ said the patient.

However, finding a person with CCR5 gene mutation is the most difficult task as it is very difficult to find such healthy individuals worldwide. However, experts from the Pasteur Institute in France found a woman who naturally had this genetic mutation.