Doctors may have cured a second man of HIV, multiple news outlets reported Monday.
According to The Associated Press, an unnamed London man diagnosed with human immunodeficiency virus in 2003 received a stem-cell transplant in 2016 to treat Hodgkin lymphoma. His donor had an uncommon, HIV-resistant genetic mutation called CCR5-delta 32, CNN reported.
The procedure appears to have "changed the London patient's immune system, giving him the donor's mutation and HIV resistance," the AP reported. A year and a half after the patient stopped taking HIV drugs, the virus has not returned, doctors said.
Another man, Timothy Ray Brown of California, aka the "Berlin patient," has been HIV-free for more than a decade after receiving two similar transplants, the AP reported.
The London patient's case study will appear Tuesday in Nature, an international science journal. Researchers also discussed their findings at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Seattle.
"By achieving remission in a second patient using a similar approach, we have shown that the Berlin patient was not an anomaly and that it really was the treatment approaches that eliminated HIV in these two people," said the study's lead author, University College London virologist Ravindra Gupta, according to CNN.
– The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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