Caution over transplant HIV 'cure'

British Aids experts have reacted cautiously to claims that German doctors had cured a man of HIV by giving him a bone marrow transplant.

The 42-year-old American man who lived in Berlin was suffering from leukaemia and had been infected with HIV for 10 years. Dr Gero Hutter and Dr Thomas Schneider of the Berlin Charite Hospital said that, following the transplant, he had been free of both diseases for two years.

The doctors said yesterday that they had selected a donor with a genetic resistance to HIV – present in 3 per cent of European adults – for the bone marrow transplant. Since the operation they had tested the patient's blood, bone marrow and other tissues for the HIV virus but had not found it.

Professor Andrew McMichael, an immunologist at the University of Oxford, said the HIV virus was adept at hiding in the body and much depended on how hard the researchers had looked for it. "Even for someone treated with exhaustive therapy there may be a few cells left," he said.

Doctors also said that such a transplant was too gruelling and expensive to be adopted as a treatment for HIV.