World To Smile As New York Patient Becomes First Woman To Be Cured of HIV

A patient with leukaemia in the United States has become the first woman and the third person to date to be cured of HIV after receiving a stem cell transplant.

According to researchers who announced the win at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunisitic Infections, the case of the 64-year-old woman is the first involving use of blood drawn from umbilical cord.

This is a newer approach that may make the treatment available to more people.

“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.”

Recall that in 2009 and 2019 respectively, two men were announced to have been cured of HIV through treatment by bone marrow transplant.

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.