Man cured of AIDS. When will BC be cured?

jenrio

Only about one in 200 or 300 HIV patients is able to naturally keep the virus from developing into AIDS without the help of medications, Walker noted. One person has been fending off AIDS since 1978.

A man with HIV developed unrelated leukemia.  "After chemo, the leukemia came back. Brown's last chance was a stem-cell transplant from a bone-marrow donor. Hütter had an idea. He knew little about HIV, but he remembered that people with a certain natural genetic mutation are very resistant to the virus. The mutation, called delta 32, disables CCR5, a receptor on the surface of immune-system cells that, in the vast majority of cases, is HIV's path inside. People with copies from both parents are almost completely protected from getting HIV, and they are relatively common in northern Europe-among Germans, the rate is about one in a hundred. Hütter resolved to see if he could use a stem-cell donor with the delta-32 ­mutation to cure not just Brown's leukemia but also his HIV.

Hütter found 232 donors worldwide who were matches for Brown. If probabilities held, two would have double delta 32. Hütter persuaded the people at the registry to test the donors for the ­mutation; his laboratory paid, at a cost of about $40 per sample. They worked through the list. Donor 61 was a hit" 

Notice how tentative the man's leukemia doctor was. He did not know that much about HIV but made a connection and a leap in faith, went through a lot of extra nonstandard procedure to get his patient the perfect donor.    His patient, with the help of transplantation, is now "cured" of HIV.    He doesn't even need to take antiviral cocktails that already gives HIV patients near normal life expectancy.    This doctor is amazing.

The story is compelling.   Please take a moment to read through them.

Quote:  His colleagues and the chief of his unit were dubious. "The main problem was that I was just a normal physician-I had no leading position. It was not always easy to get what we needed," Hütter recalls. Brown himself was not pushing the idea. "At that point, I wasn't that concerned about HIV, because I could keep taking medication," he says.

Before Hütter asked the donor registry to begin testing, he'd searched the literature and contacted AIDS experts. It dawned on him that no one had ever done this before. "My first thought was, I'm wrong. There must be something I was missing." In a sense, that was true. Gero Hütter did not know what most AIDS researchers and clinicians had taken as accepted wisdom: A cure was impossible. 

-End quote 

http://nymag.com/health/features/aids-cure-2011-6/

http://news.yahoo.com/study-digs-secrets-keeping-hiv-check-180404115.html

 

What does it mean for breast cancer patients?   Note how AIDS, even without cure, has life expectancy of 63 year old, while MBC patients has life expectancy of a few years/months from diagnosis.    Yet, some MBC patients with certain immunity genes have the best prognosis for BC.   One day these genes can be figured out and maybe a cure.   For this day to be soon, patients and doctors and researchers need to work together.

 

Heidihill

I read about this but not all the details. Thanks for putting this out here. Since breast cancer can involve at least 10 mutations, maybe one needs a cocktail of stem cells from different donors.

jenrio

More quotes from nymag:

---------------------- 

For Brown's cure to be relevant on a wide scale, it would have to be possible to create the delta 32 mutation without a donor and without a transplant-preferably in the form of a single injection. As it happens, progress toward that goal has already begun, in the laboratory of Paula Cannon at the University of Southern California. Instead of a donor, Cannon is using a new form of gene editing known as zinc finger nucleases, developed by the California company Sangamo BioSciences. Zinc finger nucleases are synthetic proteins that act as genetic scissors. They can target and snip a specific part of the genetic blueprint: They can, for instance, cut out the code that produces the CCR5 receptor, yielding a cell with HIV resistance.

Cannon works with mice given human immune systems, since normal mice cannot get HIV. In one study, she took human stem cells, treated them to have the CCR5 mutation, and injected them into a group of mice, with another set of animals given untreated stem cells as a control. Then she infected both groups with HIV. The result, as published in Nature Biotechnology in July 2010: The control group got sick and died. The mice given the mutation fought off the virus and remained healthy.

---  End quote 

Genetic therapy is a direction that needs to be pursued for MBC.   The same article also mentioned a HIV charity on a used-car sized budget trying to drum up enthusiasm for the HIV cure and how this case of cured AIDS patient (by an obscure doctor who knew little about AIDS) for years received little notice from the AIDS scientific cycle or the broad public.

I think this story has great deal of relevance for the search for MBC cure.  and is a great inspiration for patients/family/doctors/researchers alike. 

wallycat

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/06/13/154869103/traces-of-virus-in-man-cured-of-hiv-trigger-scientific-debate?ft=1&f=1001

Maybe no cure at all at the moment, sadly.

jenrio

Any MBC patient would be delighted to be Brown with 3 lovely choices:

1.  live a near normal lifespan with the help of anti-viral drugs

2.  be cured completely

3.  be sort-of "cured", with "traces of AIDS virus fragment found among billions of cells in intestines" (not even whole live viruses, just fragments!), which may be lab artifact.

But she would not be delighted if she has to cut herself into a billion pieces to prove that she is indeed "cured"!   Mr Brown already underwent a lot of testing as it is in order to sort of prove it to naysayers. 

Someday, if MBC has a cure (even if it's a continuous drug cocktail, as long as its normal life span), we can have a giant party and all the naysayers can eat their words and drank champagne too.