José Alcamí

The Karolinska Institute has awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their groundbreaking discoveries, which have radically changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system, and made it possible to develop vaccines at unprecedented speed during the covid-19 pandemic.

A study published in the journal Cell shares the case of the "New York patient", a woman with leukaemia and HIV who identifies as "mixed race" and has been free of the virus since 2017. She would be the first woman to be cured of the virus after a bone marrow transplant and there are now four such cases, along with patients in Düsseldorf, Berlin and London. The method involves transplanting HIV-resistant stem cells, this time from umbilical cord blood.

A virological and immunological follow-up confirms that a third patient has been cured of HIV nine years after receiving a bone marrow transplant for myeloid leukaemia, and four years after stopping his antiretroviral treatment. This case of the Düsseldorf patient, similar to two previously documented in Berlin and London, is detailed in a Nature Medicine publication by an international consortium coordinated by the IrsiCaixa AIDS Research Institute and the University Medical Center in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The patient was diagnosed with HIV in 2008 and in 2011 with leukaemia, for which he received the transplant in 2013.

During Pfizer's appearance before the European Parliament this week, a company executive responded to the question of whether "Pfizer's vaccine was tested to stop transmission of the virus (SARS-CoV-2) before going to market" by saying "no".

A study of more than 700,000 people in Sweden analysed the effectiveness of the heterologous schedule, combining the AstraZeneca vaccine with another dose of a messenger RNA vaccine, with the traditional homologous schedule, consisting of two doses of AstraZeneca. The results showed increased protection against SARS-CoV-2 infection when two different vaccines were combined.