Doctors Cure HIV Patient Using New Transplantation Technique

Doctors at New York’s Weill Cornell Medicine (WCM) have successfully treated an HIV patient using a new transplantation technique which involves blood cells obtained from the umbilical cord of a newborn.

According to details, WCM had treated a mixed-race female patient in August 2017 while intricacies of the case were announced at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) on Tuesday.

She’s the third person ever and first-ever female to be medically cured of HIV. She has been virus-free and without drugs for over 14 months now, and the doctors who treated her have preferred to exercise caution at this stage and termed her successful treatment as “long-term remission.”

CROI participants lauded the development and said that it holds immense potential for curing more HIV patients of different racial backgrounds using the unusual and far gentler transplantation technique.

Case Details

The umbilical cord blood recipient received her blood transplant thanks to a donor with a genetic mutation that blocks HIV. The mutation is found only in people with European heritage, making it hard to find well-matched stem-cell transplant donors for non-white HIV-positive patients.

The patient received the blood cell transplant originally to treat high-risk acute myeloid leukemia. Along with the umbilical cord blood, she also received blood stem cells from a first-degree relative.

More than three years later, the patient eventually stopped taking antiretroviral drugs to suppress the HIV infection. Since then, 14 months have passed, with the patient not having to take these drugs again and no signs of HIV re-infection.