The medical world has welcomed the first case of HIV completely cured. Is that possible, some have asked themselves. After years trying to find answers and solutions for HIV patients, German researchers are closer than ever to offer the “miraculous” treatment. Not to keep you waiting anymore, I will start by saying that the lucky patient was a US citizen living in Berlin. He was as skeptical as any other patient would have been, but he decided to give this treatment a chance.

The patient was suffering from advanced leukemia and HIV. Dr. Gero Huetter of the Clinic for Gastroenterology wanted to cure his cancer with a bone marrow transplant. However, he did more than that. He had the brilliant idea of using the bone marrow of a donor who was naturally resistant to HIV. Statistics show that 1 percent of all Europeans carry the genetic mutation that makes them resistant to the virus.

Twenty months after the transplant, the patient was still HIV-free. “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 treatment wasn’t simple at all, as the patient had to endure powerful radiation and drug therapy to kill the infected bone marrow cells and disable his immune system. In fact, such a treatment could be fatal to recipients 20-30 percent of the time because having no immune system they would be exposed to serious conditions that could kill them.

However, the fact that the treatment succeeded 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,” Anthony Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said.