A California man, 68, diagnosed with HIV and blood cancer has been cured of BOTH conditions, his doctors reveal in follow-up

A California man is about to be declared cured of HIV and blood cancer.

Paul Edmonds, 68, who made international headlines last year when he shared his story, still has no traces of either condition five years after he received a cell transplant that rid his body of both diseases.

In a new article from the medical team that treated him, doctors said he was officially cured of cancer and would be declared cured of HIV in two years – while he will be off medication since 2020.

Edmonds’ medical journey began when he was diagnosed with AIDS in 1988, at a time when the virus was often a death sentence for many gay men.

Despite watching so many of his friends die from the infection, he persevered and lived happily married to his husband, until a devastating leukemia diagnosis in 2018 seemed to ruin their future plans.

He was being treated for the cancer with stem cell therapy, which replaces stem cells damaged by chemotherapy with healthy cells from a donor – when doctors saw a unique opportunity: finding a donor with an HIV-resistant genetic mutation.

Doctors were eager to see if they could replicate the success of previous patients who had been cured of HIV and cancer in this way.

Mr. Edmonds is one of only five to beat both diseases and the oldest person to do so.

“I’m extremely grateful … I can’t thank them enough,” Mr. Edmonds said of his doctors at the City of Hope clinic in California.

Mr. Edmonds, of Desert Hot Springs in Riverside County, received a stem cell transplant, the final part of treatment for blood cancers such as leukemia and lymphoma.

It is given when the blood-forming stem cells in a patient’s bone marrow have been killed by radiation or chemotherapy.

Stem cells are special human cells that can develop into many different cell types, such as muscle cells or brain cells.

Healthy, blood-producing stem cells from a donor with similar genes are transplanted into the patient, allowing them to produce cancer-free blood.

In Mr. Edmonds’ case, the donated stem cells also had a rare genetic mutation linked to resistance to HIV-1.

He was diagnosed with HIV and AIDS in 1988, at the height of the national epidemic, which he says felt like a death sentence.

“People died within a few years of finding out they were positive,” he said of his experience with AIDS in San Francisco in the 1980s. “There was a dark cloud hanging over the city.”

Mr Edmonds had been receiving antiretroviral therapy for HIV since 1997, which had suppressed his virus to undetectable levels.

But the therapy does not completely cure HIV, so the virus was always present in his immune cells in the blood.

This means that if therapy is stopped, the virus begins to multiply and becomes detectable in the blood again.

He was diagnosed with leukemia in 2018. Older patients with HIV often develop blood cancers because of their weakened immune systems.

Mr Edmonds’ cancer – acute myeloid leukemia (AML) – is a form of blood cancer that starts in young white blood cells in the bone marrow.

About 19,500 new cases occur in the U.S. each year.

Symptoms may include: fatigue, fever, frecent infections, beasy rustling or bleeding, including nosebleeds or heavy periods, and weight loss.

The exact cause of AML is unclear.

Transplant patients must first go into remission for cancer, which usually requires intensive chemotherapy so that the cancer cells are removed.

Giving chemotherapy to patients receiving IV antiretroviral therapy, as Mr. Edmonds did, can be difficult because chemotherapy can briefly undermine a patient’s immune system.

In November 2018, Mr. Edmonds began chemotherapy. He needed three rounds to achieve remission, which was achieved in mid-January 2019.

The following month, Mr. Edmonds received stem cells from his donor.

The stem cells he received contained two copies of a rare genetic mutation called CCR5 delta-3, which makes people resistant to HIV.

Only one to two percent of the population has this mutation.

HIV uses the receptor CCR5 to invade and attack the immune system, but the CCR5 mutation prevents the virus from entering this way.

The transplant completely swapped Mr. Edmond’s bone marrow and blood stem cells with those of the donor.

Since the transplant, he has shown no signs of AML or HIV.

In March 2021, Mr Edmonds stopped taking his HIV medication and had his HIV levels checked once a week to ensure the virus had not returned.

Each time no virus was detected.

Mr Edmonds is one of only five people worldwide to have gone into remission following a stem cell transplant.

“The case of City of Hope shows that it is possible to achieve remission from HIV even at an older age and after living with HIV for many years,” said Dr. Jana Dickter, clinical professor in the Department of Infectious Diseases at City of Hope.

‘Additionally, remission can be achieved with a lower intensity regimen than the therapy received by the four other patients who went into remission for HIV and cancer.’

“As people with HIV continue to live longer, there will be more options for personalized treatments for their blood cancer,” she added.

“For those who would benefit from a stem cell transplant to treat their cancer, the idea that they can simultaneously go into remission from HIV is astonishing,” Dr. Dickter said.

The case was described in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Dr. Stephen Forman, a professor in the Department of Hematology and Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation, said the hospital “didn’t stop there.”

“Our researchers are working, among other things, to create stem cells with the genetic mutation that makes them naturally resistant to HIV,” he said.

If left untreated, HIV can lead to AIDS, and without medication people typically survive for about three years.

Since the epidemic began in 1981, an estimated 36.3 million people have died from AIDS-related diseases.

About 1.2 million Americans have HIV, and although there is currently no cure, medications reduce the amount of virus in the body by preventing the virus from replicating. This means that it cannot be transmitted to others and cannot cause harm to the body.

Symptoms include fever and muscle aches, headache, sore throat, night sweats and diarrhea, but some can last ten years or more without symptoms.

Treatment options have evolved significantly since HIV was first identified in the early 1980s. The progression of treatment went from patients having to take multiple pills a day that may not even work well at first, to taking just one daily pill that combines all known therapies into one.

Gene editing experts think they are on the verge of a cure for HIV, after three patients in the US were injected with genetic material along with an enzyme called CAS9.

Early studies suggest the enzyme can cut away parts of the virus’s DNA that become stuck in human cells, eliminating it completely.

The current study aims to prove the treatment is safe, but data on how well it works is expected next year.