Bone marrow transplant 'cures HIV patient' | Hacker News Reader

Bone marrow transplant 'cures HIV patient'

news.bbc.co.uk

21 pointskeltecp1113 comments

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This received plenty of exposure at the time it happened:

In a statement, Professor Rodolf Tauber from the Charite clinic said: "This is an interesting case for research.

"But to promise to millions of people infected with HIV that there is hope of a cure would not be right."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7726118.stm

I've heard of it before. It works, and it's not as obscure as this article makes it look.

The downside is that it's simply too impractical. There's too much chance that you will develop complications following the bone marrow transplant. Overall, you're better off just taking medication.

It can't help that the only time I've heard of this so far is from this publication... Which appears to be a small-time local publication.

It's not even on their front page.

[Edit: When I posted this comment, the link to this submission was the Gulf Bay Area news or something like that.. It was a small gulf-state publication; NOT the BBC. I'd delete my comment since the title and the link have substantially changed, but there are replies, so I won't.]

The New England Journal of Medicine is not a small-time local publication. And this is exactly what the article is about - it should be BIG news.

http://content.nejm.org/content/vol360/issue7/index.dtl

Thanks for the link. I'm not able to read it without a subscription.

Is the relevant article titled: "Not an HIV Cure, but Encouraging New Directions"?

I guess its just an editors comment, and the source article is "Brief Report: Long-Term Control of HIV by CCR5 Delta32/Delta32 Stem-Cell Transplantation"

Anyway, I can't access it as well. This is the way scientific journals promote knowledge :/

Far from being suppressed, this was covered in the news media when it was first announced and received some minor fanfare. It's interesting from a research point of view, perhaps, but it isn't a feasible treatment, because the procedure (full bone marrow replacement) is too risky, not to mention extremely complex and expensive. The normal AIDS drugs are still the state of the art. Even if you were an AIDS patient with an unlimited budget, you would probably not want this treatment unless you could somehow foresee that the drugs weren't going to work for you.

Maybe because it is not applicable on a large scale? Not sure if it could become feasible to grow the bone marrow outside of humans, but I guess it is not feasible yet.

If I understand the story correctly, it says that 1 patient stopped having AIDS who was being given adult stem cells as treatment.

Unfortunately, this does not mean that AIDS has been cured. Based on researching this story, it is not clear that anyone else has been cured by this treatment.

I haven't heard that many 'full recovery, no viruses left' HIV stories.

"one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind"

Best case long-term survival rate for bone marrow transplant is probably less than 90%.

Actually, the survival rate for the bone marrow transplant itself is about 75%. When the story was in the news some time ago, this was widely mentioned as the main reason why this is no viable AIDS treatment: unless you also have terminal leukaemia, you lower you survival chance by undergoing the treatment.

Well, if this does work, I hope that the medical community will finally get past the "no money in exchange for organs/body parts" thing. It has good intentions, but unfortunately it prevents thousands of people from receiving necessary parts (whether it is a kidney, liver or bone marrow).

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