Another HIV Patient Goes Into Remission After Cancer Trea...

By Melissa Fleur Afshar

Life and Trends Reporter

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A 60-year-old man based in Berlin, Germany, has become the seventh known person in the world to achieve long-term HIV remission, thanks to undergoing cancer treatment for his leukemia.

The patient had been diagnosed with HIV back in 2009 and later developed acute myeloid leukemia in 2015. Soon after, he underwent a stem cell transplant to treat the cancer and ended up going into HIV remission. Researchers had known that a specific kind of stem cell could remedy HIV infection, but this man's slightly different donor still did the job.

Unlike most of the few others who have gone into remission from HIV through a stem cell transplant, this patient's stem cell donor had only one copy of the genetic mutation known to block HIV infection. The previous, equally successful patients had relied on donors with two copies of the mutation, known as CCR5 Δ32, which is a mutation in a gene that encodes the protein CCR5.

Despite that difference, the 60-year-old man still managed to stop taking antiretroviral therapy three years after his transplant and he has remained HIV-free for another three years since. Immunologist Christian Gaebler and his team hope that this seventh case of remission, and how differently it was achieved, can widen the possibilities for future HIV cures and broaden the pool of prospective donors.

Experts had previously assumed that homozygous donor cells were needed to cure HIV, meaning that two copies of the mutant version would be essential to combat the existing virus, but the new study shows that HIV remission is still possible with just one copy.

This suggests that other factors may contribute to the clearance of the virus and gives researchers more scope to explore.

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Around 40 million people in the world live with HIV, and antiretroviral therapy remains the cornerstone of treatment to make life for those diagnosed more manageable and suppress the progression of the virus. However, antiretroviral therapy does not eliminate the existence of the virus, which persists in so-called viral reservoirs and can rebound quickly if treatment is interrupted.

In the case of the 60-year-old man, researchers found no evidence of HIV-1 replicating in his body—specifically in his blood or intestinal tissues—in the years following the transplant. The success of the procedure marks the seventh case of HIV cure that has ever been documented in the estimated 88 million people who have caught the virus since the epidemic's onset in the 1980s.

Researchers were able to confirm remission in several ways. For example, they spotted that HIV-specific antibody levels "gradually decreased to low or undetectable" following the stem cell transplant, whereas they had previously increased following the diagnosis of HIV.

The findings have been published in Nature, alongside two other studies led by U.S. researchers, Steven Deeks and David Collins, who explored how HIV-1 could be kept in the body at low levels.

Deeks and his team of researchers identified features of T cells that were associated with virus control in patients who showed slower rebound after therapies.

David Collins and his team identified similar T cell features in patients who were able to keep the virus in their bodies at low levels in previously reported clinical trials to induce HIV-1 remission.

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References

Gaebler, C., Kor, S., Allers, K., Perotti, M., Mwangi, D., Meixenberger, K., Hanke, K., Trenkner, T., Kraus, T., Sha, Y., Arentowicz, C., Odidika, S., Grahn, N., Scheck, R., Perkins, N., Pardons, M., Igbokwe, V., Corman, V., Burmeister, T., … Penack, O. (2025). Sustained HIV-1 remission after heterozygous CCR5Δ32 stem cell transplantation. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09893-0

Kiani, Z., Urbach, J. M., Wisner, H., Olatotse, M. J., Chang, D. Y., Acklin, J. A., Piechocka-Trocha, A., Bonheur, N., Khatri, A., Lichterfeld, M., Gunst, J. D., Søgaard, O. S., Caskey, M., Nussenzweig, M. C., Walker, B. D., & Collins, D. R. (2025). CD8⁺ T cell stemness precedes post-intervention control of HIV viremia. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09932-w

Peluso, M. J., Sandel, D. A., Deitchman, A. N., Kim, S. J., Dalhuisen, T., Tummala, H. P., Tibúrcio, R., Zemelko, L., Borgo, G. M., Singh, S. S., Schwartz, K., Deswal, M., Williams, M. C., Hoh, R., Shimoda, M., Narpala, S., Serebryannyy, L., Khalili, M., Vendrame, E., … Rutishauser, R. L. (2025). Correlates of HIV-1 control after combination immunotherapy. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09929-5

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