An AIDS patient is apparently free of HIV after receiving a bone marrow transplant during leukemia treatment. He received stem cells from a donor with that a genetic mutation, making him immune to HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Here's more.


STORY:
These German doctors have witnessed what could be a medical breakthrough. They've been treating a leukemia patient - at the Benjamin Franklin clinic in Berlin - and part of the therapy was a bone marrow transplant. But the man, a 42-year-old American living in the German capital, also has AIDS.

After receiving the transplant - amazingly it seems he is no longer HIV positive - a story that's made front-page news in Germany.

Dr. Gero Huetter - who's a leukemia specialist - is the doctor who treated him. He replaced the patient's bone marrow cells with stem cells from a donor who has a genetic mutation that prevents them catching HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

[Gero Huetter, Doctor]:
"The treatment, the stem cell transplant, was carried out to treat the leukemia, and not to treat the HIV infection. If you like, that was a side-effect, we would have carried out the stem cell transplant anyway, even if we hadn't found the suitable donor with the mutation."

The patient hasn't taken anti-retroviral AIDS drugs for almost two years. But the doctors still haven't been able to detect HIV in his blood.

But the unusual medical side-effect of this case won't change treatment for HIV sufferers:

[Gero Huetter, Doctor]:
"This is because the therapy has such a high mortality rate that it can't be justified ethically, other than in this special situation, where the patient has to have a transplant due to another illness. I say this, in order to reduce false hopes."

Doctors are still a long way from finding a cure for AIDS - and this case doesn't change that.

But it's hoped this discovery could open up new avenues of research, as scientists work towards finding a way to tackle HIV.