According to the New York Times, two patients in Boston infected with HIV  have been virus-free for two weeks after having bone marrow transplants for blood cancer.

The international AIDS conference announced on Wednesday that their antiretroviral drugs were stopped and improvements have continued to have been made. One of the patients has been off their antiretroviral therapy for about eight weeks, while the other has been off the drugs for 15 weeks. This duration is reportedly too short for researchers to say whether the virus is completely cured or not, but so far, no signs of antibodies have been found in their blood or tissue samples.

The patients’ success echoes that of Timothy Ray Brown, the famous “Berlin patient,” who has shown no signs of resurgent virus in the five years since he got a bone-marrow transplant from a donor with a rare mutation conferring resistance to H.I.V.

The Times says that “normally, when a patient stops the drugs, the virus bounces back in less than a month, but each person is different.” The doctor who is caring for said patients, Dr. Timothy Henrich said:

It could come back in a week, or in six months, only time will tell.

The tests and processes that these two patient went through is not 100% safe. It was said that a third patient, who underwent the same study, died when his cancer returned. The difference between these three patients and Mr.Brown is that he was “cured” from leukemia, while the rest of the Boston patients had been suffering from lymphoma.

Only time will tell if this is another case of remission or in fact, an actual cure for the deadly virus.

[Source:NY Times]