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>New York Times reported
A Woman Is Cured of H.I.V. Using a Novel Treatment
She’s the third person ever to be cured. Researchers announced that the new approach holds the potential for curing more people of racially diverse backgrounds.
A woman of mixed race appears to be the third person ever to be cured of H.I.V., using a new transplant method involving umbilical cord blood that opens up the possibility of curing more people of diverse racial backgrounds than was previously possible, scientists announced on Tuesday.
Cord blood is more widely available than the adult stem cells used in the bone marrow transplants that cured the previous two patients, and it does not need to be matched as closely to the recipient. Most donors in registries are of Caucasian origin, so allowing for only a partial match has the potential to cure dozens of Americans who have both H.I.V. and cancer each year, scientists said.
The woman, who also had leukemia, received cord blood to treat her cancer. It came from a partially matched donor, instead of the typical practice of finding a bone marrow donor of similar race and ethnicity to the patient’s. She also received blood from a close relative to give her body temporary immune defenses while the transplant took.
Researchers presented some of the details of the new case on Tuesday at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Denver, Colo.
The sex and racial background of the new case mark a significant step forward in developing a cure for H.I.V., the researchers said.
“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,” said Dr. Steven Deeks, an AIDS expert at the University of California, San Francisco who was not involved in the work.
Infection with H.I.V. is thought to progress differently in women than in men, but while women account for more than half of H.I.V cases in the world, they make up only 11 percent of participants in cure trials.
But Dr. Deeks said he did not see the new approach becoming commonplace. “These are stories of providing inspiration to the field and perhaps the road map,” he said.
Powerful antiretroviral drugs can control H.I.V., but a cure is key to ending the decades-old pandemic. Worldwide, nearly 38 million people are living with H.I.V., and about 73 percent of them are receiving treatment.
A bone marrow transplant is not a realistic option for most patients. Such transplants are highly invasive and risky, so they are generally offered only to people with cancer who have exhausted all other options.
There have only been two known cases of an H.I.V. cure so far. Referred to as “The Berlin Patient,” Timothy Ray Brown stayed virus-free for 12 years, until he died in 2020 of cancer. In 2019, another patient, later identified as Adam Castillejo, was reported to be cured of H.I.V., confirming that Mr. Brown’s case was not a fluke.
Both men received bone marrow transplants from donors who carried a mutation that blocks H.I.V. infection. The mutation has been identified in only about 20,000 donors, most of whom are of Northern European descent.