AIDS: for the first time in France, a woman “potentially” cured of the disease

This is a reason for hope for millions of patients, even if the conditions required to benefit from the miracle treatment to defeat HIV are still excessively onerous today. But on January 10, 2025, the Cisih teams in Marseille announced big news: one of their patients has officially become “a potential case of cure” for AIDS. At the very least, “we can already talk about remission of HIV infection”, underline the caregivers at Sainte-Marguerite hospital.

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Since October 2023, the patient, who contracted the virus in 1999, has no longer followed any retroviral treatment. And despite a strategy of very regular checks by the healthcare team, “first weekly, then bimonthly and now monthly”, “all the results remained negative”, notes Cisih. Better: its level of lymphocytes reflecting the quality of its immune defenses, the first targets of HIV when it infects the body, has been multiplied by five, to return completely to normal.

A unique allogeneic bone marrow transplant

This “miracle” was obtained after an allogeneic bone marrow transplant procedure, made necessary by the detection of leukemia in this patient in February 2020. The healthcare team then tried to kill two birds with one stone, by using “a donor not only compatible, but also presenting a particularity sought in this type of case: a deletion called Delta32 in the CCR5 gene”. In other words, a rare genetic mutation that blocks HIV contamination.

Until the case of this patient from Marseille, seven people had been officially cured of AIDS in the world, each time through an allogeneic bone marrow transplant. In six cases, the donor presented this genetic particularity.

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However, “this allograft strategy is unfortunately not reproducible in all patients infected with HIV”, specifies the AP-HM, since the very heavy treatment can only be justified in the context of “a hemopathy malignancy such as lymphoma or leukemia. The news nonetheless remains full of hope, since it allows “an ever finer understanding of how HIV works.”