Hope for an AIDS cure?

[Zathras]

After a bone marrow transplant, a man was cured of AIDS.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081113/ap_on_he_me/eu_med_aids_treatment

[Bdoomed]

bet that guy is bursting with joy

[Heradel]

There's a Times article that's a bit more restrained, they note that the procedure has a 10-30% chance of killing the patient, so while it's a cure, it's not an especially helpful one considering the modern manageability of the disease.

[Zathras]

Didn't finish reading the Times article.  They have too much stuff going on at that page, rockets flying around and such.

Even if this isn't the cure, it's a lot closer than we've been, isn't it?

[wintermute]

There's a Times article that's a bit more restrained, they note that the procedure has a 10-30% chance of killing the patient, so while it's a cure, it's not an especially helpful one considering the modern manageability of the disease.

To be fair, the Yahoo article did also contain the following: "Before the transplant, the patient endured powerful drugs and radiation to kill off his own infected bone marrow cells and disable his immune system — a treatment fatal to between 20 and 30 percent of recipients." So it's no like they glossed over the significant chances of death.

If they can get that number down significantly, then this is going to turn into something very useful - disease management is all well and good, but it's not a patch on a cure. Maybe within 10 years this will be something worth doing on a routine basis...

[Thaurismunths]

There's a Times article that's a bit more restrained, they note that the procedure has a 10-30% chance of killing the patient, so while it's a cure, it's not an especially helpful one considering the modern manageability of the disease.

Yes and no.
They say that marrow transplants to cure Leukemia have a 10-30% mortality rate. Marrow with the additional Delta 32 doesn't add any additional risk.
What this does seem to show is that, as said in the Yahoo article, gene therapy or CCR5 inhibitors might be a real cure.

[Corydon]

I don't claim any special knowledge here, but it does seem that every few years a promising new AIDS treatment emerges-- AZT, multiple drug therapy, etc.-- but turns out not to do the trick.  So while I'm delighted to hear about this man, and I'll keep my fingers crossed for a gene therapy-based cure, I won't get my hopes up too much.

[wintermute]

AZT and multiple drug therapy were never (that I can recall) touted as being cures, but rather treatments for AIDS. Both were wildly successful; AZT was the first effective treatment for AIDS and took the life expectancy of a sufferer from 6 months to a decade or more. MDT (in particular, HAART) means that AIDS sufferers now have a decent chance of dying of old age rather than AIDS-related infections.

This looks like being a promising line of research, but I'd agree that it's too early to open the champaign. At the moment, the data is basically a single anecdote (albeit a very convincing one). Once there have been some proper studies done, we'll know one way or the other.