On the Bloomberg wire and at its partner, Business Week, Rob Waters introduces maybe you and certainly me, unless I’d heard of him and forgot, to a remarkable man who had AIDS but no longer does. He calls him the Berlin Patient.
This is a straight business story, focussing on a company with an idea, and thus as are many business stories, largely a piece that takes at face value the company’s business plan. Not exactly an unpaid ad, but close to it. It is a remarkable business plan, even accounting for the lack of any discouraging word in the piece. The news is that a San Francisco man, after a stem cell transplant in 2007 in Berlin in which he received cells from another person with natural resistance to HIV, seems to be cured. And not merely of HIV infection but of AIDS. And that a California company called Sangamo BioSciences is aiming for a commercial, mass market version using an occasionally reported technology, involving “zinc fingers” that alter DNA, to tweak stem cells to generate immune systems resistant to HIV infection.
Which, if it works, and even if it’s colossally expensive when imagined as a mass treatment, is colossal news.
I am also colossally confused. Waters reports explicitly that this 44-year-old San Francisco man who now seems clear of the virus had, until recently, been known in medical circles only as ‘the Berlin patient.”
If so, he may be Berlin patient #2. The first one is described well in this 1998 New York Times story by Mark Schoofs, headlined The Berlin Patient. My guess is that The Berlin Patient of that story is the source of the transplant to our San Francisco patient with the apparent cure, and that the Bloomberg/BusWeek story gets mixed up on who the near-fabled Berlin Patient is. And it’s not the first report to do so:
- AFP – Kerry Sheridan (Dec. 16, 2010): ‘Berlin Patient’ is still free of HIV three years after deadly stem cell transplant ; Hmm, best not call stem cell transplants deadly unless they are almost always so. This also identifies David Baltimore as among principles of a company, perhaps this same one but it is not clear from this account, seeking to commercialize such treatment.
*UPDATE – See comments below to see why, but in writing this I got a little carried away on the idea that these two surprising, seemingly fully-cured “The German Patient” examples in the history of HIV and AIDS treatment are somehow intertwined. I withdraw the implication that reporters on the recent episode had significant holes in their stories due to omission of the earlier one. I apologize to Waters and Sheridan, who resented implications of oversight I made as result of my delight with myself on learning there was a German Patient #1. It remains a curious thing. And now to return to the original post….
There probably are others. But if it took me only a moment to search out “The Berlin Patient” and the term’s history, the exact meaning of the term ought to have been explored and, if there is more than one of them, explained in print. In an email exchange, Rob Waters assures me that at least since a 2009 paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, the title “The Berlin Patient” has been on the patient in his story.
A search for a good technical description of Sangamo’s zinc fingers strategy reveals:
- medGadget: Zinc Finger DNA-Binding Protein Technology Gives T-Cells Shield Against HIV ; (late addition: a closer look show this is mostly a company press release, which I’ve added to Grist below).
Thus, the Bloomberg/BusWk story has been building, and has been reported in bits and pieces, for years. It merits update. But it also could have used more history, and some perspective. A cure for AIDS is a huge claim. Any hint of such a thing ought to include an explicit recognition of the long list of astoundingly hopeful ideas and initial results that have, so far, fallen short of fulfilling those hopes.
Grist for the Mill:
Sangamo Feb 7 Press Release ; Sangamo 2008 Press Release ;
– Charlie Petit
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