facility in Duarte, California, where he was treated, because he does not want to be identified.Īs well as being the oldest, the patient has also had HIV the longest, having been diagnosed in 1988 with what he described as a “death sentence” that killed many of his friends. The latest patient, the fourth to be cured in this way, is known as the “City of Hope” patient after the U.S.
While the transplant was planned to treat the now-66-year-old’s leukemia, the doctors also sought a donor who was naturally resistant to the virus that causes AIDS, a mechanism that first worked to cure the “Berlin patient”, Timothy Ray Brown, in 2007. The oldest patient yet has been cured of HIV after receiving a stem cell transplant for leukemia, researchers reported on Wednesday. I was a beauty queen - now Lyme disease has left me bedriddenġ0-year-old girl’s vacation ends with her developing ‘most painful condition’ known to mankind I took fistfuls of anti-aging supplements to be forever young - it just made me sick “There’s something magical about these cells and something magical perhaps about the cord blood in general that provides an extra benefit.My daughter will go blind from a rare disease - we’re travelling the world so she can see it while she still can “Umbilical stem cells are attractive,” Deeks tells the Times. Umbilical cord blood may also contain therapeutic elements other than the stem cells, according to the Times. “These are newborns, they are more adaptable,” he says. The scientists aren’t sure why the umbilical cord blood works so well, experts tell the Times. One possibility is that umbilical stem cells are more capable of adapting than bone marrow stem cells, says Koen Van Besien, director of the transplant service at Weill Cornell. “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,” Steven Deeks, an HIV researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the work, tells the Times. As a result, they say, allowing for umbilical cord transplantations that are only partial matches might open treatment options for patients with both HIV and cancer who come from more diverse backgrounds. The scientists behind the treatment tell the Guardian that most donors included in registries are of Caucasian descent. “We estimate that there are approximately 50 patients per year in the US who could benefit from this procedure,” Koen van Besien, one of the doctors involved in the treatment, tells The Guardian. However, these transplants are unlikely to benefit HIV patients who don’t also have other diseases such as cancer, HIV researcher Sharon Lewin, who’s the director of the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity in Melbourne, Australia, and was not involved in the work, tells the Journal. Since umbilical blood is more readily available than bone marrow, researchers say the treatment could likely help other patients as well, reports the Times. The umbilical cord cells don’t need to be genetically matched as closely to the recipient as bone marrow cells do and could potentially improve treatment options for people with both cancer and HIV. That’s why her doctors implanted the adult stem cells, which gave her body temporary immune defenses while the umbilical cord blood cells replicated and eventually replaced the adult stem cells, reports the Journal. Umbilical cord blood transplants usually don’t serve as a treatment for cancer since they can take up to six weeks to engraft and because there are typically few stem cells in the cord. See “ Woman’s Body Appears to Rid Itself of HIV”
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