Sibling Stem Cell Transplant Leads to Rare HIV Remission in ‘Oslo Patient’

After receiving a stem cell transplant from his brother, a 63-year-old Norwegian man known as the “Oslo patient” has become one of only a handful of people to see their HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) go into long-term remission.

While HIV can now be controlled with medication that stops the virus from replicating, the virus remains in the body, rebounding when the drugs are stopped. So case studies like this one are invaluable for researchers working towards a full cure.

The Oslo man was given a bone marrow stem cell transplant to treat a rare type of blood cancer. Discovering at the last minute that his brother carried a rare genetic mutation previously shown to resist HIV, researchers led by a team from Oslo University Hospital closely tracked the operation’s impact on the virus.

The researchers tracked ‘chimerism’ – how much of the blood and immune cells had been taken over by the donated versions. (Myhre et al., Nat. Microbiol., 2026)

Four years after the transplant, called an allogeneic (donor) hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT), all traces of functioning HIV DNA were found to have been cleared in the treated individual. He was able to stop his HIV medication two years after the HSCT, with still no evidence of viral rebound at 5 years post-HSCT.

“The case of the Oslo patient contributes valuable evidence to the existing knowledge base regarding HIV cure cases,” write the researchers in their published paper. “this and other studies on HIV cure enhance our understanding of HIV pathology, molecular mechanisms, and predictive biomarkers that may be of broader interest, extending beyond patients treated with allogeneic HSCT….