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'Functional cure' for AIDS to be tested in Canadian lab

A new treatment that has, in at least one case, produced a “functional cure” for AIDS will be further explored through exhaustive lab tests this fall, including some slated for an undisclosed Canadian facility.

Dr. Jeffrey Laurence, senior scientific consultant for amfAR, The Foundation for Aids Research (and co-author in 1984, with Dr. Luc Montagnier, of a paper identifying HIV as the infectious agent that causes AIDS) confirmed in a telephone interview with The Tyee on November 14 that his foundation has taken a serious interest in a recently reported experimental treatment involving an HIV positive American resident of Berlin, who was treated for leukemia with radiation, chemotherapy, and perhaps most crucially, with transplanted stem cells from a donor who carries a rare mutation (delta 32CCR5) that leaves the bearer immune to the most common form of HIV.

After this drastic (and in itself potentially lethal ) treatment, the patient has lived for close to two years without any further Aids-related medication, and continues to show no evidence of any detectible viral load anywhere in his body, a state Dr. Laurence describes as a “functional cure.”

“This is, of course, only one case,” Dr. Laurence cautioned, “and the procedure in Berlin was very drastic. It would not be advisable for anyone who was not on the brink of death. It does, however, show that a gene therapy for AIDS could work.”

Dr. Laurence pointed out that the procedures undergone by the patient featured in the February report are both costly, with a price tag of nearly a quarter million dollars, and dangerous, with a death rate of 15 per cent for such transplant cases in thirty to one hundred days after the operation.

However, Dr. Laurence said his foundation was impressed enough with the case study presented to a conference this February in Boston by Dr. Gero Hutter and other researchers that they convened a three-day-long experts’ round table at MIT in September, where ten of North America’s top AIDS researchers agreed that the Berlin treatment had resulted in a functional cure for AIDS.

The experts discussed next step investigations, some of which will be conducted by a Canadian laboratory, Dr. Laurence said. A number of North American labs will perform exhaustive and independent tests on blood samples from the Berlin patient, looking for viral DNA, viral RNA and other markers associated in the literature with HIV resistance.

“However, I am not at liberty to name any of the labs where these tests are being conducted,” he said. “We do expect some results within a month, and I believe Dr. Hutter has an article that will be published soon.”

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