Gero Hütter
Gero Hütter ( born December 18, 1968) is a German hematologist.
Hütter and his team transplanted bone marrow in which a crucial HIV receptor, however, the leukemia patient, Timothy Ray Brown, who was also HIV infected. In the sequence of HIV was no longer detectable in it. The case generated a strong media coverage, and Hütter was one of the " Berlin of the year" 2008, the Berliner Morgenpost.
HIV treatment
Published in 2009 Hütter, Eckhard Thiel and other doctors at the Charité in Berlin, an article about the case in the New England Journal of Medicine. Your patient Timothy Ray Brown, a Berlin-based U.S. citizens who had both acute myeloid leukemia and HIV. The doctors found a bone marrow donor with a CCR5 - Δ32 mutation in two genetic copies of a gene that encodes a chemokine receptor called CCR5 on the cell surface. Since use "almost all" HIV strains the CCR5 receptor to infect a host cell, the mutation confers resistance to HIV. The patient himself was heterozygous for CCR5 Δ32. After transplantation, the CD4 T cells were in his blood homozygous for CCR5 Δ32. The macrophages in its organs, which further showed different forms of CCR5 (since they had not yet been replaced by the bone marrow precursors ) showed no detectable virus attack. After 600 days without antiretroviral drug treatment, the HIV level was in blood, bone marrow and organs below the limit of detectability. It was suspected the virus in other tissues. However, biopsies from colon, liver, lymph nodes and bone marrow were performed on patients in addition to a brain biopsy. All were HIV negative. After two and a half years without anti -HIV drugs no virus was found in his body. His HIV antibody level is falling, as might be expected in a person who has been vaccinated against HIV. It is believed that the patient's HIV, the immune system is not exposed and therefore, decreases the concentration of the HIV antibodies in blood. Likewise, it is assumed that his HIV antibody test will be negative in a few years.
The mortality rate of bone marrow transplantation contraindicated this type of treatment for HIV -positive without leukemia or lymphoma. Some researchers, such as Edward Berger, suspect that you could develop a resistance to CCR5 inhibition when CXCR4 strains of HIV are common. These use CXCR4 instead of CCR5 as a coreceptor, and thus be independent of this. Although the patient had prior to treatment low levels of CXCR4 viruses, but after that could not be detected even this type HIV. Hütter found it " very surprising ".
Jay Levy, one of the first researchers to HIV early 1980s isolated and described, wrote an editorial to Hütter's publication in the New England Journal of Medicine. The reduction of detectable HIV virus in the blood and the gradually increasing number of T helper cells it receives therein may acknowledge, but warns that this treatment premature to designate as a remedy. Finally, we know that HIV hides in a latent form in many organs that can not be easily examined, such as the heart and brain. The high risks of bone marrow transplants make the treatment even dangerous, because many patients die in the process. Also, could the CXCR4 viruses that were detected before treatment, eventually erupt. Levy believes, nevertheless, that this case " could pave the way for innovative approaches with long-lasting viral control and limited toxicity for patients with HIV infection ."
On June 4, 2010 Dr. Hütter's patient was extremely healthy and since 2 years of HIV and cancer free.
Dr. Hütter was on June 3, 2010, an award from the AIDS Policy Project, an advocacy group for a cure for HIV.