An American research team reported that it has possibly cured HIV in a woman for the first time.
for people with blood malignancies who lack HLA-identical donors. 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.
For the New York patient, who has a mixed-race ancestry, the Weill Cornell team and its collaborators found the HIV-resistant genetic abnormality in the umbilical cord blood of an infant donor. They paired a transplant of those cells with stem cells from an adult donor. Both donors were only a partial HLA match to the woman, but the combination of the two transplants allowed for this.
The woman’s transplant engrafted very well. She has been in remission from her leukemia for more than four years. Three years after her transplant, she and her clinicians discontinued her HIV treatment. Fourteen months later, she still has experienced no resurgent virus. of a child in Mississippi who was in a state of what at the time she called a “functional cure.” After apparently contracting HIV from her mother in utero, the baby was treated with an atypically intensified antiretroviral regimen shortly after birth. When Persaud announced the case study, the toddler had been off of HIV treatment for 10 months with no viral rebound. News of this supposed HIV cure swept around the globe and ignited a media frenzy.