A man Brown with AIDS developed unrelated leukemia.
Quote:
Only about one in 200 or 300 HIV patients is able to naturally keep the virus from developing into AIDS without the help of medications.
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After chemo, the leukemia came back. Brown's last chance was a stem-cell transplant from a bone-marrow donor. Hütter had an idea. He knew little about HIV, but he remembered that people with a certain natural genetic mutation are very resistant to the virus. The mutation, called delta 32, disables CCR5, a receptor on the surface of immune-system cells that, in the vast majority of cases, is HIV's path inside. People with copies from both parents are almost completely protected from getting HIV, and they are relatively common in northern Europe-among Germans, the rate is about one in a hundred. Hütter resolved to see if he could use a stem-cell donor with the delta-32 mutation to cure not just Brown's leukemia but also his HIV.
Hütter found 232 donors worldwide who were matches for Brown. If probabilities held, two would have double delta 32. Hütter persuaded the people at the registry to test the donors for the mutation; his laboratory paid, at a cost of about $40 per sample. They worked through the list. Donor 61 was a hit.
Notice how tentative the man's leukemia doctor was. He did not know that much about HIV but made a connection and a leap of imagination, went through a lot of extra nonstandard procedure to get his patient the perfect donor. The patient, Brown, with the help of transplantation, is now "cured" of HIV. Brown doesn't even need to take antiviral cocktails that already gives HIV patients near normal life expectancy.
The story is compelling. Please take a moment to read through them.
What does it mean for breast cancer patients? Note how AIDS, even without cure, has life expectancy of 63 year old, while MBC patients has life expectancy of a few years/months from diagnosis. Yet, some MBC patients with certain immunity genes have the best prognosis for BC. One day these genes can be figured out and maybe a cure. For this day to be soon, patients and doctors and researchers need to work together.
More quotes from nymag:
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For Brown's cure to be relevant on a wide scale, it would have to be possible to create the delta 32 mutation without a donor and without a transplant-preferably in the form of a single injection. As it happens, progress toward that goal has already begun, in the laboratory of Paula Cannon at the University of Southern California. Instead of a donor, Cannon is using a new form of gene editing known as zinc finger nucleases, developed by the California company Sangamo BioSciences. Zinc finger nucleases are synthetic proteins that act as genetic scissors. They can target and snip a specific part of the genetic blueprint: They can, for instance, cut out the code that produces the CCR5 receptor, yielding a cell with HIV resistance.
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Genetic therapy is a direction that needs to be pursued for MBC. The same article also mentioned a HIV charity on a used-car sized budget trying to drum up enthusiasm for the HIV cure, how the idea of cure was met with great skeptism and self-doubt even by Hutter, and how this case of cured AIDS patient (by an obscure doctor who knew little about AIDS) for years received little notice from the AIDS scientific cycle or the broad public, .
I think this story has great deal of relevance for the search for MBC cure, and is a great inspiration for patients/activitists/doctors/researchers alike.
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