TWO HIV-positive men who underwent bone marrow transplants to treat blood cancer seem to have been "cured" of the infection, the Washington Post reports.
The men, who haven't been named, stopped taking the anti-retroviral medication that are used to treat HIV, however the infection failed to come back. Medical researchers say the finding offers "new avenues" to treating the infection in millions of patients worldwide.
The two american men had been HIV-positive for concerning twenty five years, Timothy Henrich and Daniel Kuritzkes from Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital told a world Aids Society conference in kuala lumpur nowadays. the boys each underwent bone marrow transplants to treat blood cancer about four years ago, a method within which cancerous blood cells are replaced with healthy donor cells.
Timothy Ray Brown, the primary person to be 'cured' of AN HIV infection, conjointly had a blood stem cell transplant in 2007 to treat leukemia. however his donor had a rare gene mutation that has natural resistance to HIV.
Henrich said the 2 men in his study got cells by "ordinary donors" who failed to have the change.
The fact that each men are declared freed from HIV suggests the virus will be eradicated by regenerating blood cells.
Henrich told the times the two men are "living as normal a life as they will once stem cells transplants".
He warned it is still too early to mention conclusively that the boys had been utterly cured. "We demonstrated 1,000 to 10,000-fold reduction within the size of the HIV reservoir within the peripheral blood of these 2 patients, however the virus may still be present in different tissues like the brain or duct track," he said.
But researchers are optimistic as a result of "almost all" patients who stop HIV treatment see the virus returning at intervals twelve weeks.
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