The patient, who received no treatment for the infection but was a rare “elite controller” of the virus, eight years after she was first diagnosed, showed no signs of an active infection, the researchers said. and there was no sign of the virus intact anywhere in her body. Second. This has only happened once before.
The 30-year-old woman in the new study is only the second patient described to have achieved a cure for this sterilization disease without help from a stem cell transplant or other treatment. Another patient described as achieving this is a 67-year-old woman named Loreen Willenberg.
“A sterilization cure for HIV has previously been observed in only two patients with highly toxic bone marrow transplants. Our study shows that such a cure can also be achieved in natural infection process – in the absence of a bone marrow transplant (or of any kind,” Dr. Xu Yu, of the Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT, and Harvard, the study’s author, wrote in an email to CNN on Monday.
“The examples of a naturally evolving cure show that current efforts to find a cure for HIV infection are not elusive, and the prospect of a cure,” Yu writes. ‘the generation without AIDS’ can succeed.”
Yu, Dr. Natalia Laufer of Argentina, and their colleagues analyzed blood samples obtained from 30-year-old HIV patients between 2017 and 2020. She gave birth in March 2020, allowing the scientists to placental tissue collection.
The patient was first diagnosed with HIV in March 2013. An analysis of billions of cells in her blood and tissue samples revealed that she had been infected with HIV before, but during the analysis, the The researchers found no intact viruses that were able to replicate. All they could find were seven defective spare regions – a form of the virus that is incorporated into the host cell’s genetic material as part of the replication cycle.
The researchers weren’t sure how the patient’s body was able to clear itself of the intact, replicating virus but, “we think it’s a combination of different immune mechanisms – cells T cytotoxicity may be involved, innate immune mechanisms may also contribute,” Yu wrote in his email.
“Expanding the number of individuals potentially curative for sterilization will facilitate our discovery of the immune factors that lead to this sterilization cure in a broad population of people living with HIV. “
About 38 million people are living with HIV around the world. When left untreated, the infection can lead to acquired immunodeficiency syndrome or AIDS. Last year, around 690,000 people worldwide died from AIDS-related diseases.
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