Dubai, United Arab Emirates (CNN) — An American woman has become the third known person to recover from acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, “AIDS,” and the first woman of mixed race, thanks to a transplant of stem cells made from umbilical cord blood, according to research presented at Tuesday’s conference. .
The woman, described by researchers as middle-aged and of mixed race, was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia four years following she was diagnosed with HIV, according to a brief report from the Conference on Retrovirals and Opportunistic Infections.
After she was diagnosed with leukemia, she received a high-dose chemotherapy that destroyed her blood cells. Later, she had a stem cell transplant from an adult family member to make up for her lack of blood cells. This constituted a bridge to preserve her blood cells during the transplantation of stem cells from the umbilical cord blood of a newborn child who is not in the family, because it takes regarding a month to start producing cells. Cord blood contains a mutation that makes the cells anti-HIV.
More than three years following the transplant in 2017, the patient stopped taking her HIV medication, known as antiretroviral therapy, and no trace of the virus was found 14 months later.
Dr. Marshall Gillespie, associate chair of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Weill Cornell Medicine and a member of the research team, noted that the advantage of using umbilical cord blood is that it was taken from a national center that allows scientists to identify the anti-HIV blood mutation.
This mutation was also present in the two previous patients who were cured of AIDS following being transplanted with stem cells.
This countermutation is mostly found in people of northern European descent, which limits the ability to transplant these stem cells to non-white people. However, the patient in the study was determined to be of mixed race, and therefore matched the transplant, which widens the number of potential people of different races who can receive this treatment. Cord blood does not require strict stem cell matching as is the case for an adult stem cell donor.
“It is likely that this treatment, by transplanting stem cells from umbilical cord blood, will be available to a large number of people with this virus who need a transplant, because strict matching is not necessary,” Gillespie told CNN.
Dr. Yvonne Bryson, Head of the Department of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, and lead researcher in the study, said that a man participated in this study from the beginning, but died of recurring cancer before his results were evaluated.
This woman was also cured of cancer 4 and a half years ago. She did not develop graft-versus-host disease (GVHD), which is when donor cells attack recipient cells following transplantation, unlike the other two people who have recovered from HIV. These previous experiences led researchers to hypothesize that GVHD was important for treatment. Gillespie commented that this woman’s case refutes previous findings.
Nevertheless, the researchers cautioned that this treatment can be applied to a small portion of people infected with HIV.
Gillespie Bryson agreed, noting that “this is not the right type of treatment for someone who does not have a medical need for a transplant,” noting that this type of transplant can be fatal for regarding 20% of people, or may cause other health problems for them.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, explained in an interview on a radio program on Tuesday, “This woman happened to have an underlying disease that required a stem cell transplant, so I don’t want people to think that it can be applied to 36 million people.” They have HIV,” he said, adding that it was “impractical to think that this treatment would be widely available.”
