An American woman has been successfully cured of HIV infection. This is officially the third time worldwide that a cure has been achieved. Researchers from the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of Los Angeles presented the case at a press conference on Tuesday.
The patient had also had leukemia and had been treated with a stem cell transplant. To do this, her doctors had opted for a new method to cure both the cancer and the HIV infection at the same time. They had used stem cells from the umbilical cord blood of a newborn whose blood cells were immune to the HI virus. In addition, the woman had received stem cells from an adult donor. The patient had not suffered a recurrence of leukemia since then. Three years after the transplantation, she was able to stop taking her HIV medication, and 14 months later the HIV virus is no longer detectable in the woman’s blood.
A peculiarity of the case was that the patient was of mixed ethnicity. However, the mutation that creates immunity to the HI virus is particularly common among Americans of European descent. It was therefore difficult to find a donor with sufficient genetic similarity to the patient who also carried the mutation.
New treatment option for 50 patients per year
In fact, the donors were only partially genetically matched to the woman. For cord blood, however, genetic similarity is less important for transplantation. Because stem cells from umbilical cord blood would not normally be sufficient to fight cancer in an adult, the woman was also given a donation from an adult human.
The scientists believe that this will provide a new treatment option for around 50 patients in the United States each year who have both leukemia and HIV and would not normally be able to find a suitable donor. However, stem cell transplantation would not be suitable as a treatment method for other HIV-infected people. The procedure is very risky and the risks would outweigh the possible benefits. Unless cancer is present at the same time, HIV infection would continue to be treated with antiviral drugs, which, while not completely curing an infection, can greatly reduce it.