Report: US woman is cured of HIV using new treatment

A woman of mixed race has been cured of H.I.V. in the United States, the New York Times reported on Tuesday.

She is believed to be the third person ever to be cured of the disease.

The development was said to have been announced on Tuesday at a ‘Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic ‘Infections’ held virtually.

According to NBC News, the patient, described as a person of “mixed race”, received treatment at the New York-Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center in the US.

She was said to have been diagnosed with HIV in 2013, while she was confirmed to have leukemia in 2017.

According to scientists, she was cured 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.

Cord blood is more widely available than the adult stem cells typically used in bone marrow transplants, and does not need to be matched as closely to the recipient, the Times reported.

“The procedure used to treat the New York patient, known as a haplo-cord transplant, was developed by the Weill Cornell team to expand cancer treatment options for people with blood malignancies who lack HLA-identical donors,” the NBC news report reads.

“First, the cancer patient receives a transplant of umbilical cord blood, which contains stem cells that amount to a powerful nascent immune system. A day later, they receive a larger graft of adult stem cells. The adult stem cells flourish rapidly, but over time they are entirely replaced by cord blood cells.”

“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.