Summary Blood-cancer specialists had said that had seemingly cured a 42-year-old US patient of HIV/AIDS.
Physicians in Germany who say they have "functionally cured" a patient with HIV/AIDS are warning that their accidental breakthrough is effective for only about one percent of patients who suffer from AIDS.
Blood-cancer specialists at Charite Hospital in Berlin had said that had seemingly cured a 42-year-old US patient of HIV/AIDS by giving him a bone-marrow transplant whilst treating him for cancer.
Their breakthrough was made possible by studies in the late 1990s revealing that some people were resistant to HIV/AIDS, according to a report in New Scientist magazine on the Berlin haematologists' discovery.
In these people, the virus cannot enter and destroy the white blood cells that it infects and destroys in most other people. They owed their resistance to a mutation in the gene that makes the molecular "door handle" by which HIV/AIDS gains access to cells.
Called CCR5, the protein door handle was misshapen in the immune individuals, locking HIV/AIDS out of their white blood cells, the New Scientist report noted.
Since the discovery, it has been established that about one percent of Europeans have the same mutation, making them resistant to HIV/AIDS. To be resistant, they had to inherit the same mutation from both parents.
