A new and important advance in the fight against HIV has taken place in New York (United States), where a woman has been cured after carrying out a blood transplant of umbilical cord, just as he has advanced ‘New York Times‘.
The patient, a mixed-race woman, was treated at New York-Presbyterian Weill Cornell Hospital in Manhattan and was first diagnosed with HIV in 2013, and with leukemia since 2017. An advance that has been reported at a medical conference that has been held in Denver (Colorado). The treatment antiviral you received retired after 37 months of the operation.
Unlike the transplant bone marrow, in which it is essential that there is a total coincidence between the donor and the recipient, For this case, in which umbilical cord blood has been chosen, a genetic compatibility as strict as in the other type of transplant has not been necessary.
“A very important finding from a scientific point of view”
As explained by the doctor Steven Deeks, in a statement collected by the aforementioned medium, the fact that she is mestizo and that she is a woman “is very important from the scientific point of view.” In addition to the blood from the umbilical cord, the patient rreceived a transfusion of stem cells from the blood of a relative to reinforce the treatment. In this way, neither HIV nor cancer samples have been registered.
For his part, the head of the infectious diseases unit at Weill Cornell Medicine and New York-Presbyterian, Marshall Glesbyhe assured in statements collected by ‘The Wall Street Journal‘ that the result is “very promising“.
The experts, who had been searching for a cure for the patient for several years, trust that it can serve as a precedent to cure other patients with a similar problem. A discovery that has come weeks after it was reported that Moderna took a big step in the fight against HIVannouncing the first trial of its vaccine against the virus, and that is based on messenger RNA.
Precedent of two cases of cure in men
Along with this case of cure, there is a precedent of cure of HIV in two men who required a bone marrow transplant. The first of these took place in the year 2008, with a bone marrow transplant with a mutation in the CCR5 gene, which blocked the infection, while the second occurred in the year 2016 in Londonafter the patient underwent a similar transplant to cure lymphoma that he suffered
With the operation, in both cases, the transplanted stem cells are replaced by those of the recipient, so that resistance against the virus is conferred.
According to data provided by the World Health Organization (WHO)in the year 2020 they were more than 37 million people living with HIV worldwide and what they received antiretroviral treatment. During that year, the organization reports that 680,000 people died of HIV.