Cell: The World's First Female AIDS Healer Appears

On March 16, 2023, Hsu Jingmei's team from Weill Cornell Medical College published a research paper entitled "HIV-1 discharge and possible cure in a woman after haplo-cord blood transfusion" online at Cell, which reported that a patient who received CCR5 Δ 32/ Δ "The first remission and possible HIV-1 cure in a mixed-blood woman with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) treated with a haploid matched umbilical cord blood transplant (cord blood cells combined with haploid matched stem cells from adults).".

The case reported in this article is a "New York patient", the first female patient who may be cured. So far, there are five cases of long-term remission of AIDS after stem cell transplantation, namely "Berlin patients", "London patients", "New York patients", "City of Hope patients" and "Dusseldorf patients". At present, only the detailed treatment of "City of Hope patients" has not been published in academic journals.

Source: Screenshot of the paper

The patient had a cord blood chimerism rate of 100% CCR5 at the 14th week after transplantation Δ 32/ Δ 32 patients were followed up for 4.8 years.

Studies suggest that the immune reconstitution of this patient is related to these factors: ① the disappearance of a replicative HIV-1 reservoir; ② HIV-1 specific immune response disappeared; ③ Demonstrate resistance to laboratory variants X4 and R5 in vitro, including pre transplant autologous latent reservoir isolates; ④ Anti retroviral therapy was discontinued at 37 months after transplantation, and HIV 1 control was achieved for 18 months with viremia.

Source: Paper Illustrations

To sum up, research suggests that CCR5 Δ 32/ Δ 32 haplotype transplantation achieves remission and possible HIV-1 cure.

Source: Cell World, iMedicines

Editor: Lin Shuting Reviewed by: Huang Meihui, Zhu Xiaojie