Dear Science on HIV and Marrow Transplant

Jonathan Golob, "Cure HIV with a Bone Marrow Transplant?"

This is a case report, of an experience in a single patient. I’m loathe to declare that since “[d]octors have not been able to detect the virus in his blood for more than 600 days” this patient is cured from AIDS, let alone consider this as proof that transplantation of CCR5 mutant bone marrow will cure everyone with HIV of the infection.

If this is generally true–transplantation with CCR5 lacking bone marrow can “cure” you of HIV infection–big, but solvable, problems remain.

First, donors lacking CCR5 are rare–about 1% of the population. And it’s already difficult to find CCR5 normal bone marrow that is a close enough match to transplant. This could potentially be solved by using gene knockdown, to turn off the normal CCR5 genes most donor bone marrow contains.