A case study published in the journal Nature on Tuesday reveals that a second person, identified as the “London patient”, has been cured of HIV-1, thus opening up the possibility of a new cure.

He is the second person worldwide to experience remission, 10 years after the first healing case of the "Berlin patient" was reported. Both cases were treated with stem cell transplants from donors who carried a rare genetic mutation that made them resistant to HIV.

"By achieving remission in a second patient using a similar approach, we have shown that the Berlin Patient was not an anomaly and that it really was the treatment approaches that eliminated HIV in these two people," lead author of the study and a professor in University College London's Division of Infection and Immunity, Ravindra Gupta, said.

It seems that not all patients are eligible for this new method, but it still gives hope to new treatment strategies, including gene therapies.

This viral infection inflicts close to 37 million people worldwide, and almost 1 million people die annually from HIV-related causes.