Since the AIDS epidemic surfaced in 1980, some 75 million people have been infected with HIV and only one person has been cured, Timothy Ray Brown, aka the "Berlin patient." Now, a second infected person, who received a similar intervention to Brown, also appears to have cleared his infection. Both Brown and a man dubbed "the London patient" had blood cancers that required stem cell transplants. At the advice of their doctors, they received transplants from immunologically matched donors who also happened to have mutations in CCR5, a receptor on white blood cells that HIV uses to establish infections. The transplants may have also helped rid their bodies of HIV because they required "conditioning" regimens of toxic chemicals—and in the case of Brown, whole body irradiation, too—to kill off their tumor cells. What9s more, they both had graft-versus-host disease in which the donor immune cells attack the recipient9s tissues as foreign, which further could have killed residual HIV. As the London patient9s doctor explained at an AIDS conference in Seattle, Washington, this week and in a description of the case in Nature, the man (who wants to remain anonymous) has been off anti-HIV drugs for 18 months and has no detectable virus in his blood on the most sensitive assays. The researchers studying him are being cautious and saying he is in long-term remission, not cured—and indeed the virus has rebounded in others who looked cured but many months later had HIV resurface. The intensive intervention also will only make sense for HIV-infected people with blood cancers, a tiny fraction of the 37 million people living with the virus today. But there9s hope that if both men indeed are cured it will spur simpler interventions that genetically modify CCR5, some of which are being studied today.

中文翻译：

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第二个艾滋病毒感染者被治愈了吗？

自 1980 年艾滋病流行以来，约有 7500 万人感染了艾滋病毒，只有一个人被治愈，蒂莫西·雷·布朗，又名“柏林病人”。现在，第二个接受了与布朗类似干预的感染者似乎也清除了他的感染。布朗和一个被称为“伦敦病人”的人都患有需要干细胞移植的血癌。在医生的建议下，他们从免疫匹配的捐赠者那里接受了移植，这些捐赠者碰巧也有 CCR5 突变，CCR5 是一种 HIV 用来建立感染的白细胞受体。移植可能还有助于清除他们体内的 HIV，因为它们需要使用有毒化学物质的“调理”方案——在布朗的情况下，全身照射也是如此——以杀死他们的肿瘤细胞。更重要的是，他们都患有移植物抗宿主病，在这种疾病中，供体免疫细胞将受体组织作为外来物进行攻击，这可能进一步杀死残留的 HIV。正如这位伦敦病人的医生本周在华盛顿西雅图举行的艾滋病会议上和《自然》杂志对该病例的描述中所解释的那样，这名男子（希望保持匿名）已经停用抗 HIV 药物 18 个月，并且没有检测到对他血液中的病毒进行了最灵敏的检测。研究他的研究人员持谨慎态度，称他处于长期缓解期，尚未治愈——事实上，其他看起来已经治愈的病毒已经在其他人身上反弹，但几个月后艾滋病毒又重新出现。强化干预也只会对感染 HIV 的血癌患者有意义，他们是当今 3700 万感染该病毒的人中的一小部分。