Has This Man Finally Discovered the Cure for AIDS.?
The Charite University of Medicine is a multi-faceted organization of hospitals, universities, and research centers located in Germany. You could compare it to a major American university’s medical center, but on a larger scale. They have many hospitals and outlets and a complicated website. Suffice it to say they treat more than 500,000 people per year and train thousands of doctors.
Their homepage is HERE. It’s tricky to navigate and contains a vast amount of data, so you have to be careful working with it.
In any event, a doctor at one of their Berlin clinics went public earlier this year with the word “cure” as it relates to a man who was HIV-positive. The patient is described as a 42-year-old American living in Germany who had severe leukemia, and who was also HIV-positive. The patient had been under treatment for AIDS for about ten years.
The doctor is soft-spoken 39-year-old Gero Hutter.
Dr. Hutter was not really trying to cure his American patient of HIV, but to treat his leukemia via a bone-marrow transplant. But when Dr. Hutter made a phone call to the donor center trying to find a bone marrow match, he also asked if – by chance – any potential matches also contained a genetic mutation known as “Delta 32”, which is a rare mutation that provides natural resistance to the AIDS virus and is found in a very few people. Hutter knew his patient had AIDS, and although he didn’t know what would happen by using a marrow donor with the “Delta 32” mutation, he decided to try it.
Out of 80 possible matches in the database, one had the Delta-32 mutation. Dr. Hutter asked for this donor’s bone marrow to treat his patient. Hutter said later he knew the chances were a million to one that a matching donor for the patient would also have the Delta-32 mutation. He also says that what happened next was a complete surprise to him.
Two years later, the patient is doing well, and even after several extremely sensitive tests not normally used for AIDS patients, doctors can find absolutely no trace of the AIDS virus in the patient. In March of 2008, Dr. Hutter reported his results at two different medical conferences, but he was hesitant to use the word “cure”.
After some additional testing over a period of months, Hutter finally came forward again and declared his patient cured of the AIDS virus. In addition, the patient has NOT been on any anti-retroviral drugs used in AIDS treatment since his marrow transplant.
The actual process that was perfomed on Hutter’s patient cannot be extended to other AIDS sufferers. The treatment is dangerous and often fatal. The patient must undergo severe chemotherapy and radiation treatments before the marrow transplant.
However, it does offer an alternative that could work with traditional AIDS patients.
Dr. Hutter says that normal stem cells could be genetically modified to match the Delta-32 genetic mutation – and then injected into AIDS patients without having to do radiation or chemo. He believes this could actually clear the AIDS virus from sufferers of the disease, even in moderately advanced cases. This genetic modification is well within today’s technology.
If Dr. Hutter’s research holds up, he may be a candidate for a Nobel Prize.
As well he should.
