Two people have to date been cured of the HIV-1 virus according to a report.
In a case study published on Tuesday in the journal Nature, some scientists believe that the “London patient” has been cured of the viral infection.
The London cure report comes more than 10 years after the first case, known as the “Berlin patient” tested negative.
The leader of the study, a professor at University College London’s Division of Infection and Immunity, Ravindra Gupta said:
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.
The approach used in both patients entailed the use of stem cell transplants from donors who carried a rare genetic mutation, known as CCR5-delta 32, that made them resistant to HIV.
The London patient has been in remission for 18 months since he stopped taking antiretroviral drugs.