Using umbilical cord blood stem cell therapy,


　　the world's first female AIDS "cure" appears

　　Science and Technology Daily, Beijing, February 16 (Intern reporter Zhang Jiaxin) According to the latest foreign media reports, researchers announced at a conference in Denver, Colorado, USA on the 15th that scientists used a "magic" umbilical cord blood transplant breakthrough treatment method A woman infected with HIV has been cured.

This is the first woman ever to receive a stem cell transplant with HIV-fighting cells, and the third known case of a functional cure for HIV.

　　The woman, now 64, was diagnosed with HIV in 2013 and diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia four years later.

She was one of the first to receive a new transplant method using cord blood.

In a haploid cord transplant, she received cord blood from a partially matched donor to treat her cancer.

During the surgery, a close relative also gave her blood to boost her immune system.

The method boosted a mutation that prevented HIV from entering her cells.

　　More than four years since the woman's transplant in August 2017, her leukemia has gone into remission.

Three years after the transplant, doctors stopped her HIV treatment.

Fourteen months after she received a cord blood transplant, there was no sign of HIV "resurging" in her blood.

　　The advantage of using cord blood is that it comes from national repositories where scientists can identify HIV in blood Drug resistance mutations.

　　However, the mutation has only been found in about 20,000 donors, most of whom are of Nordic ancestry.

The patient in this study was of mixed ancestry, but she was still a transplant match, suggesting a wider pool of recipients from different ethnic backgrounds.

Cord blood also does not need to be matched as strictly as adult donor stem cells.

　　Compared with adult stem cells used in bone marrow transplants in the first two cured patients, cord blood is more widely available and does not require close matching with recipients.

Scientists say it is possible to cure dozens of Americans who are co-infected with HIV and cancer each year by allowing only a partial match.

　　The gender and ethnic background of the new cases mark an important step in developing HIV treatments, the researchers said.

　　The traditional treatment for AIDS is bone marrow transplantation, but for most patients, bone marrow transplantation is not a very realistic option, it is highly invasive and risky, so it is usually only offered after all other options have been exhausted of cancer patients.

　　So far, there are only two known HIV cures.

Both men were cured of HIV through bone marrow or stem cell transplants.

But as the bone marrow transplant replaced all of their immune systems, both experienced serious side effects, including graft-versus-host disease, a disease in which the donor's cells attack the recipient's body.

　　In contrast, the woman in the latest case was discharged on day 17 post-transplant without graft-versus-host disease, cord blood and her close relatives, said Jingmei Xu, a doctor at Weill Cornell Medical College. The combination of stem cells may allow her to avoid many of the brutal side effects of a typical bone marrow transplant.