A team of American scientists announced this Tuesday (15) that they have cured the first woman of HIV infection following a stem cell transplant - also called a bone marrow transplant.
Similar procedures had already been performed three other times, some successfully and some not, to cure patients infected with the HIV virus, which causes AIDS. But the good news is there: a woman, the first, has successfully undergone the treatment. The case has been dubbed the "New York patient".
Released at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, the possibly successful case report of the HIV-cure has not yet been published in a scientific journal. The study was led by Yvonne J. Bryson, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California (UCLA). The procedure was performed at the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.
The Director of the AIDS Department at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Carl Dieffenbach, - one of multiple sections of the National Institutes of Health funding the research network behind the new case study, - told NBC News that the accumulation of repeated apparent successes in curing HIV "continues to give hope."
"It is important that there continues to be success along these lines," he said.
Earlier, in the first case of what turned out to be a successful HIV cure, researchers treated American Timothy Ray Brown (who lived in Berlin) who was suffering from Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML). Brown received a stem cell transplant from a donor who had a rare genetic abnormality that gives immune cells a natural resistance to the HIV virus.
How was this possible?
Stem cell transplantation replaces the immune system of an individual with that of another person (donor), which is responsible for treating and curing some types of cancer, such as leukemia. This replacement can eliminate HIV from the organism receiving the cells, but only in some cases. For this, it is necessary that the donor has a rare genetic abnormality that confers resistance to the virus.
In the case of "patient New York," the team looked for ways to enable donation from people who were not identical donors. So "New York" first received a transplant of cord blood - which contains stem cells. The next day, the researchers transplanted a larger graft of already adult cells.
According to the team responsible for the achievement, the patient has not taken any more atiretroviral drugs to control HIV for more than 14 months. The continuous medication was stopped three years after the transplant. Now, different types of tests are performed to detect any sign of the HIV virus or antibodies, without success.
Sources: nbcnews, canaltech, heraldsun, healio, pharmacypracticenews.