A London patient has been cleared of HIV after receiving a bone marrow transplant from a virus-resistant donor three years ago.
His doctors said that he has tested negative to highly sensitive HIV tests more than 18 months after he stopped taking antiretroviral drugs.
The patient has asked his medical team not to reveal his name, age, nationality or other details.
“There is no virus there that we can measure. We can’t detect anything,” said Ravindra Gupta, a professor and HIV biologist, and co-leader of a team of doctors treating the man.
He described his patient as “functionally cured” and “in remission”, but cautioned that “it is too early to say he’s cured.”
An American, Timothy Brown, became the first person to undergo such treatment in Germany in 2007 which also cleared his HIV, leaving him free of the virus till date.
Prof Gupta, now at Cambridge University, treated the London patient when he was working at University College London.
The man had contracted HIV in 2003 and in 2012 was also diagnosed with a type of blood cancer called Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Doctors decided to seek a transplant match for him in 2016 when he fell terminally ill with cancer.
The case will be reported in the journal “Nature” and presented at a medical conference in Seattle on Tuesday.
