Two patients in Boston whom doctors hoped they had cured of both H.I.V. and cancer through bone-marrow transplants have seen their H.I.V. return, researchers said Friday.
Lai Seng Sin/Associated Press
Dr. Timothy J. Henrich had warned in July that H.I.V. in two men could return.
Although there was never an expectation that risky bone-marrow transplants would soon be a routine treatment for H.I.V., the news was frustrating to AIDS experts. Many had hoped that the "graft versus host" battle that virtually all such transplants set off could become a potent weapon, at least in a few high-risk cases.
In July, when the two cases were first discussed at an international AIDS conference, it was suggested that they might echo the case of Timothy Ray Brown, the famous "Berlin patient," who has been free of H.I.V. since a 2008 bone-marrow transplant from a donor with a rare mutation that confers resistance to the virus. Some experts regard him as the first patient cured of H.I.V.
The resurgence of the virus in the two patients is "disappointing but scientifically significant," Dr. Timothy J. Henrich, who oversees their care at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, said in a statement.
Both men are back on antiretroviral drugs and "in good health," Dr. Henrich added.
Dr. Steven G. Deeks, an AIDS researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, called the results "disappointing but not unexpected." The cases demonstrate that the virus can hide so deeply in the body that it cannot be detected by the most sophisticated lab work.
"It just takes one virus in one cell," he said.
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the failure "doesn't put an end to this avenue of research, but it certainly does put a damper on it."
The two Boston men already had H.I.V. when they developed lymphoma, a blood cancer. Both kept taking antiretroviral drugs for H.I.V. while their bone marrow was weakened to prepare for the transplants. They stayed on the drugs for years afterward.
Mr. Brown, in Berlin, received marrow from a donor with a rare mutation, known as delta 32, that makes blood cells virtually impervious to H.I.V. The Boston men's donors did not have the mutation; they were simply good matches.
Dr. Henrich hoped that the new blood cells from the new marrow would find and kill all the old ones, which were both cancerous and infected with H.I.V., and that the antiretroviral drugs would protect the new blood cells against H.I.V.
When no virus could be found in the men for months, they stopped taking the drugs.
In July, Dr. Henrich announced that one man had been off the drugs for seven weeks and the other for 15, and that no virus had been found. (It normally returns within a month or so.)
At that time, he and other researchers referred to the men as being in remission, not cured. But Dr. Henrich warned that the virus "could come back in a week, or in six months."
On Friday, he said it had returned in one man in August and in the other man last month.
Apparently, Dr. Fauci said, either some old infected cells survived or they infected some new ones before succumbing.
While there may still be a way to make bone-marrow transplants work with H.I.V. patients, Dr. Fauci said, "it tells you for sure that it's not going to be easy."
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