Doctors from the United States reported, on Wednesday, that the New York patient, who was declared a possible cure for AIDS earlier last year, had spent about 30 months without HIV detection.
The woman’s case was presented at a conference on viruses and infections in Denver, Colorado, in February 2022, in which cord blood was used for the first time, a new treatment method that may make treatment available to more patients.
Despite the announcement of the recovery of the case last year, this therapeutic approach was not published at the time in a research paper documenting the new methodology, which was what doctors in the United States did, as a study in this regard was published on Wednesday in the “Cell” medical journal.
A glimmer of hope for AIDS sufferers
In exclusive statements to Sky News Arabia, Yvonne Bresson of the University of California, who co-led the study with Dr. Deborah Persaud of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, said:
- The study reports that the first woman of mixed race achieved a potential cure for AIDS.
- Through our continuous follow-up, we can say that the case is now HIV-free for 30 months, and she has been cured of leukemia for five consecutive years.
- The use of a mixture of cord blood cells with matched stem cells expands the application to more diverse populations.
- Cord blood cells are more tolerant and do not require strict matching (as in stem cells), so it is easy to find a suitable match for the diverse sexes.
It is noteworthy that there are approximately 38 million people around the world living with HIV, provided that antiretroviral treatments are strictly adhered to for life.
In 2009, the “Berlin patient” was the first person to be cured of HIV, and since then, two other men have also been cured of the virus: the “London patient” and the “Düsseldorf patient”.
All three patients underwent stem cell transplants as part of their cancer treatments. In all cases, the donor cells came from matched or “identical” adults who carried two copies of the CCR5-delta3 mutation, a natural mutation that confers resistance to HIV by preventing HIV from spreading. Cell injury.
In the case of a New York patient, doctors relied on the methodology of cultivating a mixture of HIV-resistant cells taken from umbilical cord blood with stem cells, given that umbilical cord blood may not contain a large number of cells, and it may take a little longer to be effective.
So doctors say, “Using a mixture of stem cells from a matched relative of the patient and cells from the umbilical cord blood gives the cord blood cells a boost and makes them more effective.”
The study confirms the critical importance of the CCR5-delta3 mutation as part of stem cell transplants for HIV patients, because all successful treatments so far have relied on this mutation.