A woman has been cured of HIV using a groundbreaking umbilical cord blood transplant, scientists say

• A woman has been "likely" cured of HIV, using a novel technique involving newborn blood.
• The technique is seemingly gentler than traditional stem-cell transplantation, the only known way that people have been cured before of the virus that causes AIDS.

A formerly HIV-positive woman appears to have been functionally cured of the virus, using an unusual, and seemingly far gentler transplantation technique than ever before, which involved umbilical cord blood sourced from a newborn.

Details of her case, announced at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections Tuesday, were first reported in The New York Times. While the woman has been virus-free, without drugs, for 14 months now, her doctors cautioned that "at this stage" they "prefer to call it long-term remission."

"This case is the first to use cord blood cells, and the first to treat a woman and someone who identifies as mixed-race," Weill Cornell Medicine, the institution where the patient was treated, told Insider in a statement.

The umbilical cord blood recipient received her blood transplant in August 2017, from a donor with a genetic mutation that blocks HIV. That mutation is far more common in people of European heritage, which can make it hard to find well-matched stem-cell transplant donors for non-white HIV-positive cancer patients.

The new case suggests hope that more patients of diverse backgrounds may be able to receive stem-cell transplants in the future, though experts stress the cancer treatment isn't likely to become commonplace for curing HIV. There are already many drugs that successfully treat the virus that causes AIDS, without the time consuming, life-threatening, and risky procedures required for stem cell transplantation.

The patient was being treated for leukemia

The reason this woman received a blood cell transplant was in order to treat high-risk acute myeloid leukemia. Along with the umbilical cord blood, she also received some blood stem cells from a first-degree relative, in order to help the treatment take hold in her body.

"The transplant from the relative is like a bridge that got her through to the point of the cord blood being able to take over," Dr. Marshall Glesby, an infectious disease expert who's part of the patient's research team at Weill Cornell, told the Times.

The use of cord blood, which is more adaptable than adult blood, makes it less important for the donor and recipient to be closely matched, immunologically. (This cord blood donor and recipient, for instance, were unrelated.)

"The patient eventually stopped taking antiretroviral drugs to suppress her HIV infection, and so far, has been off the HIV drugs for 14 months, with no signs of HIV re-emergence," Weill Cornell said in a statement. This indicates "a likely cure, although physicians at this stage prefer to call it long-term remission. She has also been leukemia-free for more than four years."

Previous 'cures'

The only people who have previously been considered cured of HIV were two traditional stem-cell transplant recipients, known as the "Berlin Patient" (Timothy Ray Brown, 1966-2020), and the "London Patient" (Adam Castillejo 1980-).

But, over the past two years, at least two additional cases of what are thought to be natural HIV cures have surfaced.

The first woman, 66-year-old Californian Loreen Willenberg, is thought to be an "elite controller" of the virus. Another woman, diagnosed with HIV in 2013 in Argentina, similarly, has no trace of the virus in her body that scientists can find. Her daughter, born in 2020, is HIV-free, a feat that is usually only accomplished through antiretroviral therapy (ART) drug treatments during pregnancy.