People suffering from the immunodeficiency virus may be soon cured through a bone marrow transplant, German doctors say.

Dr. Gero Huetter, a hematologist of the Clinic for Gastroenterology, Infections and Rheumatology of the Berlin Charite hospital and his colleagues said a patient of his appears to have been cured of AIDS through a bone marrow transplant from a donor who had a genetic mutation known to help the body resist AIDS infection. The genetic mutation is called Delta 32 and prevents HIV from attacking itself to cells by blocking a receptor called CCR5. Researchers have long known that about 1 percent of Europeans carry a genetic mutation that makes their cells resistant to HIV infection.                   

The patient, a US citizen living in Berlin, was suffering from advanced leukemia and HIV two years ago when Huetter treated the cancer with a bone-marrow transplant. Huetter inserted the bone marrow of a donor naturally resistant to HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. After twenty month after the treatment, the man shows no signs of carrying the virus.

“We waited every day for a bad reading,” Dr. Huetter said adding that he and his colleagues have been unable to find the virus in blood , bone marrow, lymph nodes, intestines, or brain.

The patient had to endure powerful radiation and drug therapy to kill the infected bone marrow cells and disable his immune system, a treatment that could be fatal to recipients 20-30 percent of the time, Anthony Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said. And even if the patient would not die from the bone marrow transplant, he would have to suffer a great deal of pain.

However, the new treatment might be a proof “that if somehow you can block the expression of CCR5, maybe by gene therapy, you might be able to inhibit the ability of the virus to replicate,” he added.

Also, Kevin Robert Frost, chief executive officer of the American Foundation for AIDS Research welcomed the news saying the case is “a remarkable and exciting step forward.”

Dr. Catherine Hankins, chief scientific adviser at the UN AIDS agency in Geneva, said the therapy “is certainly not a cure but it certainly suggests to us that if we can go down the route of looking more closely at gene-therapy that might block that CCR5 receptor. Even if we can find out exactly how this patient fought HIV, we might learn more about natural protective immunity.”

AIDS researchers will now examine the German case to assess whether others can benefit from this surprising discovery.

Since 1981, when AIDS was first spotted, the disease has claimed around 25 million lives. There are 33 million infected people worldwide, according to the World Health Organization statistics, two-thirds of whom living in sub-Saharan Africa.