In a first, a middle-aged woman has been in remission from HIV for 14 months after being treated for leukemia with transplants of adult stem cells and umbilical cord blood. If she remains off treatment without any hint of HIV, she would be only the third person in the world — after the Berlin Patient and the London Patient — to be cured through a transplant.
"Her own virus could not infect her cells," said Yvonne Bryson, MD, chief of pediatric infectious diseases at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, who presented the study at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) 2022 Annual Meeting, which both presenters and the audience attended remotely.
The middle-aged New York woman of mixed race, who has asked that her specific race and age not be shared to protect her privacy, was diagnosed with HIV in 2013 when she was still in the very early stages of infection. She started treatment immediately and quickly achieved an undetectable viral load. An undetectable viral load not only prevents someone from transmitting HIV to others but also reduces or eliminates HIV replication, which means fewer variants and less time for the virus to infiltrate cells where it can hide.
