Candice Laverne Hendricks

Conflicts of Interest M.S.P. is a co-founder and non-remunerated board member of Antion Biosciences and Altera Biosciences; he receives research funding from the South African Medical Research Council, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Health Laboratory Service (of South Africa) Research Trust, the South African National Research Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and the University of Pretoria (South Africa).

1 Introduction Of the 39 million people living with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) (PLWH) globally, the highest prevalence is in sub-Saharan Africa [1]. The evolution of antiretroviral (ARV) therapy (ART) used to treat HIV since the initial introduction of the first nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor (NRTI), Zidovudine (AZT) in 1987 [2, 3], has resulted in the development of five classes of drugs with a combined number exceeding 25 [2, 4].

South Africa (SA) is a human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) endemic country in which allogeneic haematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) is performed at a low rate of approximately 2,5/million population per annum. A deficit in donors constitutes a major obstacle, and efforts advocating for an umbilical cord blood (UCB) bank [1], while concurrently improving donor numbers from African ethnolinguistic groups, are underway.