With a major leap to Aids research the scientists have claimed that they have discovered bone-marrow transplant could be used to cure HIV.It is to note that bone-marrow is an old treatment used to cure cancer like leukaemia and lymphoma. Doctors have been successful in curing a 43 year old patient who was suffering from AIDS and leukaemia. According to doctors this type of treatment will be common within next five years. The doctors operated the patient bringing bone marrow from a donor with rare resistance to HIV. The patient has no sign of the disease since he was treated since three years.
"I can see the day when it might be possible to treat many HIV patients with a bone marrow transplant from people who have this natural resistance to the virus," The Daily Express quoted Professor Eckhard Thiel of the Charite University Hospital in Berlin, who led the research, as saying.
He added: "We are convinced this treatment works. The patient we treated three years ago is perfectly healthy and we are sure the HIV virus has gone and will not come back. But we will want to carry out trials on other patients.
At present treatment will be limited as only three per cent of the world’s population are immune from HIV.But experts believe that they could take the bone marrow from a few donors and grow an inexhaustible supply of stem cells in the laboratory, thus treating many thousands of sufferers. This is a good news and many sufferers can be treated.
Details of the advance were revealed at the annual meeting of the European Group for Blood and Marrow Transplantation in Gothenburg, Sweden, and published in the New England Journal of Medicine