It is the third case in medical history: an HIV-infected woman in the USA has been cured by doctors. This was made possible by a novel stem cell therapy.
02/16/2022, 07:4302/16/2022, 08:00
According to their own statements, American doctors have been able to heal a woman who was suffering from HIV and leukemia. She is one of only three cases of successful treatment for HIV patients. Two other patients had self-healed.
A woman has been cured of HIV in the United States.Image: shuttestock
The treatment was led by Dr. Yvonne J. Bryson, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, and her colleagues JingMei Hsu, Koen Van Besien, and Marshall J. Glesby. It is the first case in which a Latin American woman, dubbed the “New York patient,” has been treated to clear her HIV infection. In addition, a new method was used for the first time. A total of ten research institutes and universities from the USA were at the study involved in the case.
Family and Infant Stem Cells
Unlike previous attempts, a “haplo/umbilical cord transplant” was performed. It consists of stem cells from a relative and stem cells from an infant’s umbilical cord. What is special: the infant stem cells contained a naturally occurring but rare gene characteristic that makes people resistant to HIV. Specifically, it is about a function in the so-called CCR5 gene that makes it impossible for the HI virus to infect cells. This peculiarity occurs predominantly in people of northern European or Caucasian descent.
After the transplant, the woman was still taking medication, which she stopped 14 months ago. To date, the HIV infection has not returned. “The virus concentration in their blood was undetectable during this whole period,” said researcher Yvonne J. Bryson when presenting her results at the “Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections”.
“Berlin patient” later died
In 2009, scientists first announced that a man with leukemia known as the “Berlin patient” might have been cured of HIV through a transplant of HIV-resistant stem cells. However, he later died of leukemia. A decade later, the approach was applied to the “London patient,” a South American man with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. A man in Düsseldorf is said to have been in HIV remission since a transplant in 2019, but is not yet considered fully cured.
The new case gives reason for hope, but is far from standard therapy. «Bone marrow transplantation is not a viable mass-market strategy for curing HIV, but it does provide ‘proof of concept’ that HIV can be cured. It also strengthens the use of gene therapy as a viable strategy for an HIV cure,” the Washington Post quoted Sharon Lewin, president of the International AIDS Society.
((t-online,wan))