Norway Man Cured of HIV With Brother's Stem Cells

A 63-year-old man in Norway seems to have gotten one of the best gifts ever given by a brother: a cure to his lifelong HIV infection. Doctors detailed the amazing turn of events in a case report out this week. The brother initially donated his stem cells to help treat the man’s life-threatening blood cancer, but he also possessed a rare mutation that grants natural resistance to HIV. Four years after the transplant, and two years after the man stopped antiretroviral therapy, he still appears to be free of the infection. “For all practical purposes, we are quite certain that he is cured,” Anders Eivind Myhre, one of the man’s doctors, told AFP Monday. Current medications have transformed HIV from a practical death sentence to a manageable health condition. Sustained therapy can even prevent infections from being transmitted to others. Yet HIV remains a lifelong ailment, and trying to stop treatment will usually cause the infection to resurge in a matter of weeks or months. In recent years, however, doctors have shown it’s possible to eradicate the last remnants of a controlled HIV infection through stem cell transplantation. HIV primarily infects certain white blood cells, and the t