Norway Man Cured of HIV With Brother’s Stem Cells | The Oslo patient is the first person to be cured by a family member's bone marrow transplant.

She wasn’t that advanced with her MS at all, I’m afraid. The trial she was in wasn’t picking people that far along.. I’ve been searching quite a bit for the people that travel to Mexico and Russia to self pay for the same but there’s little info of before and after.

The biggest problem with HIV is that it targets immune cells directly, and mutates massively. That is what has prevented both a successful vaccine and made finding treatments so difficult. There's some incredibly promising mRNA vaccines in trials right now at least, targeting HIV on critical surfaces that can't be mutated out of -- surfaces every known variant has, and cannot lose without losing it's ability to invade T-cells and thus it's ability to reproduce in humans. It'll obvious offer significant protection against getting HIV, but in those already infected -- it will hopefully do what this bone marrow donation did and create an immune response that targets HIV *effectively*, no matter how it changes. We're used to vaccines as preventatives, but they can also be *cures* in the right situation -- teaching your immune system exactly what to target and how, helping your body cure itself. As someone who grew up in the 80s and 90s -- I'd cheerfully line up for an HIV vaccine. That damn thing has haunted my generation, and I'd be glad to see the back of it.

There are numerous other strategies, like lock-and-block, kick-and-kill (latency reversal), CRISPR-Cas9 focused approaches, CAR T cell approaches. We've got researchers working on all of those at present.

*In the West. Globally HIV-related deaths number over half a million people a year (630,000 in 2024), including about 75,000 children.

But this is the first time hiv was cured with this method according to the article, yeah? HIV is a different thing from cancer. Going back to the plane analogy, the first flight wasn’t the first time gasoline was used in an engine to move a vehicle. But it was the first time it was used to move a flying vehicle, something that until then was not possible.  Like how this isn’t the first time stem cells were used to cure a disease, but it is the first time it was used to cure this particular disease that until now was uncurable. 

First bone marrow transplant for HIV was only in 2007. The key isn’t the bone marrow transplant it was the identification of the CCR5 mutation that conveyed resistance to HIV. We still are very much in the infancy because eventually we won’t need to do as extreme a procedure as a bone marrow transplant, we will just use genetic engineering to accomplish it.

>Sadly, these transplants are not a viable approach for curing HIV en masse. I learned this

I'm talking about WHO got the HIV onto the needle in the first place HIV does not just get spawned on the needle... and actually they were talking about syringes (the thing you put the needle on) that were shared condoms would solve more than half of the HIV cases