A patient with leukaemia in the United States has become the first woman and the third person till date to be cured of HIV after receiving a stem cell transplant, the New York Times had reported on Tuesday.
Researchers who announced the win at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunisitic Infections, disclosed that the case of the 64-year-old woman is the first of a new transplant method involving umbilical cord blood that opens up the possibility of curing more people of diverse racial backgrounds.
The researchers however said since receiving the cord blood, the woman described as mixed race has been free of HIV for 14 months, without the need for any treatments known as antiretroviral therapy.
Cord blood is more widely available than the adult stem cells typically used in bone marrow transplants, and does not need to be matched as closely to the recipient, the Times reported.
“The fact that she’s mixed race, and that she’s a woman, that is really important scientifically and really important in terms of the community impact.
“The procedure used to treat the New York patient, known as a haplo-cord transplant, was developed by the Weill Cornell team to expand cancer treatment options for people with blood malignancies who lack HLA-identical donors,” the NBC news reported.
“First, the cancer patient receives a transplant of umbilical cord blood, which contains stem cells that amount to a powerful nascent immune system. A day later, they receive a larger graft of adult stem cells. The adult stem cells flourish rapidly, but over time they are entirely replaced by cord blood cells,” said Dr. Steven Deeks, an AIDS expert at the University of California, San Francisco who was not involved in the work.
Recall that in 2009 and 2019 respectively, two men were announced to have been cured of HIV through treatment by bone marrow transplant.
