"For more than a decade, doctors and researchers have announced that a handful of people around the world have been cured of HIV. Each of these patients has experienced long-term viral control - in some cases for over a decade - without antiretroviral therapy (ART), as AIDSMap notes, though some doctors describe them as being in "remission." While the patients have shown no signs of HIV since stopping ART, at least some uncertainty remains as to whether the virus could eventually rebound in them."
"At the same time, experts caution that these are extremely rare and specific cases. Each patient received a stem cell transplant to treat either leukemia or lymphoma, an extreme and invasive procedure that poses its own risks. As Dr. Björn Jensen, a senior consultant at Düsseldorf University Hospital, told NPR in 2024, patients frequently do not survive the aftermath of the procedure, and in the case of those who have been cured of HIV, the transplants were only attempted because they were the only options left"
"Nearly all of these patients also received transplants from donors with the CCR5-delta-32 mutation, a genetic mutation that makes it impossible for HIV to enter their immune cells. The CCR5-delta-32 mutation is extremely rare - according to NPR, it has been found in only 1% of the population - and has only been identified in people of northern European descent."
A handful of people have maintained long-term viral control or apparent cure of HIV without antiretroviral therapy, in some cases for over a decade. Some clinicians label such cases remission because of lingering uncertainty about possible viral rebound, but many experts believe rebound would have occurred within weeks or months. Those patients underwent stem cell transplants to treat blood cancers, a risky and invasive procedure often attempted only when no other options existed. Nearly all transplants used donor cells with the CCR5-delta-32 mutation, a rare genetic change (~1% prevalence) largely found in northern European populations, limiting scalability.
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