Researchers say they have found a second patient whose body appears to have rid itself of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which causes AIDS, raising hopes that one day a way will be found to cure more people with the disease.
The patient has not received any regular treatment for her infection, but is a rare “elite controller” of the virus who, eight years after being diagnosed for the first time, shows no signs of active infection or signs of intact virus in her body, reported the researchers on Monday (15).
The fact has only been registered once before.
The international team of scientists reported in the Annals of Internal Medicine that the patient, originally from the city of Esperanza (Argentina), did not show signs of intact HIV in most of her cells, suggesting that she could have naturally achieved what they describe as a “sterilizing cure” for HIV infection.
second patient
The 30-year-old woman in the new study is only the second patient described to have achieved this sterilizing cure without the help of a stem cell transplant or other treatment. The other patient was a 67-year-old woman named Loreen Willenberg.
“So far, a sterilizing cure for HIV has only been seen in two patients who received a highly toxic bone marrow transplant. Our study shows that this cure can also be achieved during natural infection, in the absence of bone marrow transplants (or any type of treatment),” wrote Dr. Xu Yu, of the Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT and Harvard, study author, in an email to CNN International on Monday.
“Examples of such a cure that occur naturally suggest that current efforts to find a cure for HIV infection are not illusory, and that the prospects of achieving an ‘AIDS-free generation’ may ultimately be successful,” Yu wrote.
Yu, Argentina’s Dr Natalia Laufer and their colleagues analyzed blood samples collected from a 30-year-old patient with HIV between 2017 and 2020. She had a baby in March 2020, allowing scientists to also collect tissue from the placenta.
Diagnosed in 2013
The patient was first diagnosed with HIV in March 2013. She did not start any antiretroviral treatment until 2019, when she became pregnant and started treatment with the drugs tenofovir, emtricitabine and raltegravir for six months in the second and third trimesters of pregnancy, noted the researchers.
After giving birth to a healthy, HIV-negative baby, she discontinued therapy.
An analysis of billions of cells in her blood and tissue samples showed she had already been infected with HIV, but during the analysis, researchers found no intact virus capable of replicating. All they could find were seven defective proviruses, a form of virus that integrates into the genetic material of a host cell as part of the replication cycle.
The researchers aren’t sure how the patient’s body was able to apparently get rid of the replication-competent intact virus, but “we think it’s a combination of different immune mechanisms: cytotoxic T cells are likely involved, the innate immune mechanism may also contribute. ”, Yu wrote in his email.
“Expanding the number of individuals with a potential sterilizing cure condition would facilitate our discovery of the immunological factors that lead to this sterilizing cure in a broader population of HIV-infected individuals.”
About 38 million people are living with HIV infection worldwide. If left untreated, the infection can lead to acquired immunodeficiency syndrome or AIDS. Last year, nearly 690,000 people died from AIDS-related illnesses worldwide.
(*This text has been translated. Click here to read the original in Spanish)
Reference: CNN Brasil
