Cure for HIV !

Cure for HIV !

A very promising development in the research towards finding a cure for HIV Positive patients is outcome of a treatment procedure on a patient. Doctors believe an HIV-positive man who underwent a stem cell transplant has been cured as a result of the procedure.

Brown, who is known as the “Berlin Patient” received stem cells from a donor immune to HIV.

About 1 percent of Caucasians are said to be immune to the virus.

Timothy Ray Brown, 45, tested positive for HIV in 1995.He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Brown lived in Berlin, Germany in 2007, and had HIV and Leukemia. Scientists gave him a bone marrow stem cell transplant.

He is not taking HIV medication since that time. The Leukemia did come back about a year later, so he got a transplant from the same initial donor in February of 2008. Both HIV and Leukemia have not returned, he says.

Dr. Jay Levy, an HIV researcher at the University of California, San Francisco said white cells were manipulated so they were no longer infectable by HIV and became the entire immune system. He called the result a “functional cure.”

This development can have a far reaching ramification where the treatment for HIV positive patient is concerned. It would certainly give a boost towards research to develop Stem cell treatment for HIV positive patients. Who knows we may be heading towards a phase when we have a cure for HIV disease.

HIV ~ Human Immunodeficiency Virus