Second HIV patient naturally cured of virus, baffling scientists

by mcardinal

Lauren Dempsey, MS in Biomedicine and Law, RN, FISM News 

 

A 30-year-old woman from Esperanza, Argentina appears to have been naturally cured of HIV after having been diagnosed in 2013. Researchers are not sure how the patient’s immune system was able to cure itself, but think that it can be attributed to a combination of different immune system mechanisms working together. 

According to scientists, the patient was treated for six months during a pregnancy, but did not receive any medication or treatment for the disease since. In an effort to preserve the patient’s privacy, the woman is being called the “Esperanza patient.”

She is only the second person to have naturally cured themselves despite receiving no treatment. Her case is similar to that of Loreen Willenberg, whose body also cured itself from the virus without treatment 30 years after her diagnosis.

Researcher Dr. Xu Yu from the Ragon Institute in Boston, who was also an author of the study, told the Boston Globe that researchers believe that the patient “has reached a sterilizing cure.” This means that the part of the HIV virus that allows for replication to occur in the cells has been eliminated, resulting in a functional cure.

Dr. Yu also wrote “A sterilizing cure for HIV has previously only been observed in two patients who received a highly toxic bone marrow transplant. Our study shows that such a cure can also be reached during natural infection — in the absence of bone marrow transplants.” 

There have been two cases where doctors have cured HIV, with a Berlin patient and a London patient. In both cases the patients had cancer and received bone marrow transplants from donors with genetic mutations that caused their cells to be HIV resistant. However, transplants are not always a realistic option, since donors are hard to find and the procedure can be risky. 

The Ragon Institute, a medical organization focused on HIV research, in coordination with scientists from the Massachusetts General Hospital, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard University, have been studying elite controllers. This is a group of HIV cells that appear to have immune systems that have the ability to control their HIV infection without antiretroviral therapy. 

For most patients, antiretroviral therapy is required to prevent the virus from replicating inside cells of the immune system. While this treatment suppresses the virus to levels where the patient is not contagious, it is not a curative approach. Once a patient stops taking their medication, the viral levels rise.

Elite controllers have the ability to keep their viral load low without treatment. The phenomenon of a sterilizing cure seems to be specific to HIV and has not been seen in other diseases.

Discovering how these patients were able to clear the virus without any medication could be the key to finding a cure for the 38 million people who are living with HIV, which, if left untreated, can lead to AIDS. 

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