Man cured of HIV?

Paris: A person in sustained remission from HIV-1, the virus that causes AIDS, shows that the disease may one day be curable, the International AIDS Society (IAS) said Tuesday.

Reacting to the case of the patient in London who had no sign of the virus for nearly 19 months after undergoing a bone marrow transplant, the group said it demonstrated "proof of concept that HIV is curable."

"The hope is that this will eventually lead to a safe, cost-effective and easy strategy to achieve these results using gene technology or antibody techniques," said IAS President Anton Pozniak.

A second person is in sustained remission from HIV-1, the virus that causes AIDS, after ceasing treatment and is likely cured, researchers were set to announce at a medical conference Tuesday.

Ten years after the first confirmed case of an HIV-infected person being rid of the deadly disease, a man known only as the "London Patient" has shown no sign of the virus for nearly 19 months, they reported in the journal Nature.

Both patients had received bone marrow transplants to treat blood cancers, receiving stem cells from donors with a rare genetic mutation that prevents HIV from taking hold.

"By achieving remission in a second patient using a similar approach, we have shown that the Berlin Patient was not an anomaly," said lead author Ravindra Gupta, a professor at the University of Cambridge, referring to the first known functional cure.