CAMPAIGN: Princess Diana meeting AIDS patients

In a stunning breakthrough they have used a long established cancer treatment to help destroy the killer disease. Researchers have treated one patient using the method and are confident the process will work for other sufferers. Medics say the use of bone marrow transplants to cure HIV could become common in just five years. The procedure involves using bone marrow stem cells already used to help beat blood cancers like leukaemia and lymphoma. The man cured of HIV is 43 years old and had carried the virus for many years. He was also suffering from leukaemia. Doctors exchanged his bone marrow with that of a donor with a rare natural resistance to HIV. It is three years since he was treated and he has no detectable signs of the disease in his body.

Professor Eckhard Thiel of the Charité University Hospital in Berlin, who led the research, said: “I can see the day when it might be possible to treat many HIV patients with a bone marrow transplant from people who have this natural resistance to the virus. “We are convinced this treatment works. The patient we treated three years ago is perfectly healthy and we are sure the HIV virus has gone and will not come back. But we will want to carry out trials on other patients. “Our patient is doing very well and is completely clear of the virus and living a normal life.” Details of the advance were revealed at the annual meeting of the European Group for Blood and Marrow Transplantation in Gothenburg, Sweden, and published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

German doctors came up with the theory that if they could find a bone marrow donor with HIV resistance, they could achieve a cure. This was based on studies in the late Nineties which revealed that some people who should have been infected by HIV had not become ill. In order to infect human blood cells HIV must interact with two ‘receptors’ on the surface of a blood cell known as CD4 and CCR5. If CCR5 is missing then people with this genetic mutation are naturally highly resistant to HIV infection and the virus cannot enter their cells. At present treatment will be limited as only three per cent of the world’s population are immune from HIV.

But experts hope that it will be possible to take the bone marrow from a few donors and grow an inexhaustible supply of stem cells in the laboratory. That way many thousands of sufferers could be treated. Around 60,000 people in Britain are thought to be infected with HIV, including an estimated 20,000 who have yet to be diagnosed with the condition. Globally, 33million people are living with HIV and it is responsible for causing two million deaths each year. Professor John Goldman of London’s Hammersmith Hospital, said: “This opens up new ways of treating HIV patients. “It won’t be for everyone because of the limitation on the number of donors in the population who have this natural resistance to HIV.