A man known as “the Duesseldorf patient” has become the third person declared cured of HIV after receiving a stem cell transplant that also treated his leukemia, a study said on Monday.
Two other patients from Berlin and London with both HIV and cancer, have previously been reported as cured in scientific journals following the high-risk procedure.
The details of the Duesseldorf patient’s cure have now been revealed in the journal Nature Medicine.
The 53-year-old man, whose name has not been released, was diagnosed with HIV in 2008, then three years later with acute myeloid leukemia, a life-threatening form of blood cancer.
He had a bone marrow transplant in 2013 using stem cells from a female donor with a rare mutation in her CCR5 gene. The mutation has been found to stop HIV from entering cells.
