Second person declared cured of HIV, with no trace of infection in 30 months

Another patient in London, UK, is now cured of HIV, doctors have claimed. He has become only the second person in the world to have got rid of the disease.

Adam Castillejo — the now 40-year-old "London Patient" — was first diagnosed with HIV in 2003, according to The New York Times. He had stopped undergoing anti-retroviral therapy more than 30 months ago and revealed his identity on Monday (March 9).

According to the Lancet HIV journal, Castillejo was not cured by HIV drugs; but by a stem-cell treatment, he received for cancer he also had.

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Timothy Brown referred to as the "Berlin Patient", was the first person reported to be cured of HIV in 2011 — three and half years after undergoing similar treatment. He received a similar bone-marrow transplant in 2007 and has been HIV-free for more than a decade now.

"We propose that these results represent the second ever case of a patient to be cured of HIV," lead researcher Prof Ravindra Kumar Gupta, from the University of Cambridge, said in a statement, adding, "the new test results were even more remarkable and likely demonstrated the patient was cured."

In both cases, stem cells used for their transplants came from a donor who had a relatively rare genetic mutation that resists HIV infection. The aggressive therapy was primarily used to treat the patients' cancers, not their HIV.

The cure, however, is not permanent as tests suggest Castillejo still has remnants of the virus in his body, as does Brown -- adding 99 per cent of their immune cells have been replaced by donor ones.

Researchers have also cautioned that the breakthrough did not constitute a generalised cure for HIV. Castillejo's treatment was a "last resort" as he also suffered blood cancer which would likely have killed him without intervention.