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AIDS: And a second patient seems to have gotten rid of HIV completely naturally

Scientists in the US say they have most likely located a second patient whose body seems to have completely “got rid” of the HIV virus – causing AIDS – in a natural way, without a previous transplant stem cells. The patient’s body no longer shows any traces of the virus genome.

Researchers at MIT and Harvard University and the Massachusetts General Hospital, led by Dr. Su Yu, called him a “patient of Esperanto” (city of Argentina) and published a report in the Ann They reported that they analyzed almost 1.2 million blood cells and 503 million tissue cells, without finding the slightest trace of HIV.

AIDS: How HIV works and which patients have natural “weapons”

During infection, HIV inserts copies of its genome into the DNA of human cells. thus creating a “reservoir” of it. In this way, the virus is effectively hidden by anti-HIV drugs and from the reactions of the patients’s immune system.

In most patients, new virus particles are constantly springing up from this “reservoir”. Anti-retroviral therapy (ART) cannot eliminate the “reservoir”, so it is daily administration of drugs is necessary to suppress the virus.

However, some patients have an immune system capable of suppressing HIV without the need for medication, according to the APE-MPE. Although they still have the viral “reservoir”, have lethal T cells that are able to suppress the virus on their own, without the help of drugs.

“San Francisco Patient”

In 2020, Su Yu’s research team announced in the journal Nature for the first time that a 67-year-old woman, who was diagnosed with HIV 30 years ago and was named “San Francisco Patient”, in which there were solid indications that the “reservoir” had been eliminated, as there were no complete traces of the viral genome in her DNA. The analysis of billions of cells from that patient found no trace of HIV, so the patient was considered the first known case of complete cure in the world without preceding stem cell transplantation (as had happened with “Berlin patient», Timothy Ray Brown, the first to get rid of HIV, when 13 years ago he had a bone marrow transplant from a donor with HIV-resistant genes, resulting in Brown being cured of both his cancer and HIV, while a similar case of Adam Castilejo or “London patient” later became known).

The woman from Argentina who eradicated HIV

Now, the same American scientific team has reported a second possibly similar case, the “Esperanza patient”, who seems to have gotten rid of HIV without outside intervention. According to the British “Daily Mail”, this is one 30 year old woman from Argentina, whose partner had died of AIDS. She was initially diagnosed with HIV in 2013 and has not taken medication since, except for a period of six months when she became pregnant.

The researchers did not rule out the possibility that there are other cases of HIV patients who have been treated on their own, but have not yet become known. If scientists fully understand the immune mechanisms behind such self-treatments, they will probably be able to develop new types of therapies that will “teach” the immune system and other patients to mimic such reactions against HIV.

According to Yu, “We are now looking forward to the possibility of vaccinating this type of immunity in people undergoing ART treatment, with the aim of training their immune systems to control the virus without ART.”

Here you will see the relevant scientific publication.

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