An American AIDS patient appears to have been cured of the disease 20 months after receiving a targeted bone marrow transplant which is normally used to fight leukemia, his doctors said.

However, many researchers and doctors feel that this might be a fluke. Many other say that this might be a new inspiration to investigate gene therapy to fight the disease that claims 2 million lives each year.

Dr. Gero Huetter told that 42-year-old patient, an American living in Berlin had been detected to be suffering from AIDS virus for over a decade. But 20 months after undergoing a transplant of genetically selected bone marrow, he shows no signs of the disease..

"We waited every day for a bad reading," Huetter said.

It has not come. Researchers at Berlin's Charite hospital and medical school say tests on his bone marrow, blood and other organ tissues show complete absence of the disease in the patient.

However, Dr. Andrew Badley, director of the HIV and immunology research lab at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., commented that may be  those tests have not been extensive enough.

"A lot more scrutiny from a lot of different biological samples would be required to say it's not present," Badley said.

Before the transplant, the patient was administered powerful drugs and radiation to kill off his own infected bone marrow cells and disable his immune system. His intake of important drugs to treat AIDS was also stopped in an anticipation that the new, mutated cells would ward off virus on their own. Huetter revealed that some people carry a genetic mutation called Delta 32 that apparently makes them resistant to HIV infection.