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PARIS, France – A Norwegian man has been effectively cured of HIV after receiving a stem cell transplant from his brother, doctors announced on Monday.<\/p>\n
The patient’s brother happened to carry a rare, virus-blocking genetic mutation.<\/p>\n
The 63-year-old man, dubbed the “Oslo patient”, is the latest in around 10 people worldwide who have gone into long-term remission from HIV after receiving a transplant to treat unrelated blood cancer.<\/p>\n
The high-risk procedure normally requires a donor to have a specific mutation of their CCR5 gene, which blocks HIV from entering the body’s cells.<\/p>\n
Only around one percent of people in northern Europe have the necessary mutation.<\/p>\n
The Oslo patient, who had been living with HIV since 2006, was diagnosed with a fatal blood cancer called myelodysplastic syndrome in 2017.<\/p>\n
His doctors searched for a donor who would help treat both. When they couldn’t find one, they chose the man’s elder brother.<\/p>\n
However, on the day of the transplant in 2020, the doctors were stunned to discover that the brother carried the CCR5 mutation.<\/p>\n
“We had no idea… That was amazing,” doctor Anders Eivind Myhre of the Oslo University Hospital told AFP.<\/p>\n
‘Winning the lottery twice’\u00a0<\/p>\n
The patient said “it was like winning the lottery twice”, added Myhre, who was also the lead author of a study describing the case in Nature Microbiology.<\/p>\n
Two years after the transplant, the patient stopped taking the anti-retroviral drugs which had been reducing the level of HIV in his body.<\/p>\n
The researchers found no trace of the virus in samples of the man’s blood, gut and bone marrow.<\/p>\n
“For all practical purposes, we are quite certain that he is cured,” Myhre said.<\/p>\n
Now the Oslo patient, whose name was not revealed, is “having a great time” and has more energy than he knows what to do with, Myhre said.<\/p>\n
The painful and potentially dangerous transplant procedure is for people who have both HIV and deadly blood cancer, so it is not a feasible option for the millions of people living with the virus across the world.<\/p>\n
However, researchers believe that studying these rare cases will reveal more about how HIV works in the hope of finding a cure for all patients.<\/p>\n
‘No longer a patient’\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Oslo patient is the first person to receive a transplant from a family member.<\/p>\n
The patient’s immune system had been “completely replaced” by the donor’s, said study co-author Marius Troseid of the University of Oslo.<\/p>\n
It was the first time this had been observed in a cured patient’s bone marrow and gut, he told AFP.<\/p>\n
Even before the researchers found out the brother had a CCR5 mutation, they had some hope that the Oslo patient’s HIV could be cured.<\/p>\n
That is because in 2024 it was revealed that the so-called “next Berlin patient” entered long-term remission despite receiving a transplant that did not have two copies of the mutated gene.<\/p>\n
The original Berlin patient, Timothy Ray Brown, was the first person declared cured of HIV back in 2008. Patients in London, New York, Geneva, Duesseldorf and elsewhere followed.<\/p>\n
Given the Oslo patient’s robust health, Troseid suggested that his nickname was no longer suitable.<\/p>\n
“The Oslo patient is perhaps no longer a patient. At least he doesn’t feel like it,” Troseid said. \u2014 Agence France-Presse<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By DANIEL LAWLER, Agence France-Presse Published April 14, 2026 3:57pm Add GMA on Google Make this your preferred…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":60535,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[85],"tags":[18198,157,156],"class_list":{"0":"post-60534","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-oslo","8":"tag-hiv","9":"tag-norway","10":"tag-oslo"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@dk\/116402061605696499","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60534"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60534\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}