The study finds that the woman’s own body may have cured her in HIV

According to a new study, a 30-year-old Argentinean woman appears to be the second recorded person whose body may have naturally eliminated HIV.

Scanning the cells of more than a billion females did not detect a viable virus, even though they had not received antiretroviral therapy to prevent viral replication. This finding increases the likelihood that a person’s own immune system will rarely provide bactericidal treatment-elimination of viruses that can copy themselves-researchers write.

“What happened is unique,” said Stephen Dikes, an HIV researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, who wasn’t involved in the study. “As we see, she’s not controlling the virus, it’s the absence of the virus. This is completely different.”

NS studyPublished on Monday Annual report of internal medicine The journal contributes to research that has a significant impact on 37.7 million people living with HIV worldwide and can lead to AIDS if left untreated. HIV usually spreads through body fluids after unprotected sex or needle sharing.

No cure for HIV is known, but the virus was eliminated in three people who received stem cell transplants to treat cancer. However, transplantation is dangerous, often associated with complications, and makes it an unrealistic tool for treating illnesses that can be treated with a daily pill regimen and recently approved injections.

Scientists have conducted four major research areas: activating the body’s immune response to the virus, genetic therapy, and “shock-and-kill” attempts to force the virus from cells so that the immune system seeks to eradicate the virus. I’m looking for a cure for HIV. A “block-and-lock” effort to prevent the virus from staying inside the cell and replicating.

An Argentine female in a new study joins Lauren Willenberg, another female whose immune system is known to have eradicated HIV. Willenberg in Northern California may have been the first to heal without a bone marrow transplant or medication.

Dikes, who worked on Willenberg’s research last year, said both women could have been cured because they had abnormally strong T cells, a component of the body’s immune system. Understanding the mechanism could be the key to developing a therapeutic vaccine that can wipe out HIV without long-term adverse effects, he said.

It is also possible that an Argentine woman developed an HIV-specific immune response before she became infected because her partner died of AIDS. Joel Blankson, an HIV researcher in Johns Hopkins Medicine, wrote in an editorial published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. .. Researchers argued that female cells could be used to replicate her immune system in mice and study the effects of infecting rodents with HIV.

An Argentinean woman was diagnosed with HIV in March 2013. In an eight-year follow-up, researchers write that 10 tests did not detect detectable levels of virus in her blood or tissues.

She had not received antiretroviral therapy until she took the pill regimen in the second and third trimesters of pregnancy from late 2019 to early 2020. The woman discontinued treatment after giving birth to a baby who was not infected with HIV. In her body. Scientists have discovered a fragment of HIV. This indicates that she was previously infected and that the virus had replicated.

Researchers said it couldn’t prove that the woman had healed, but said it was likely. They called her an “Esperanza patient” in the study, after the city of Argentina from which she was born. “Esperanza” is also the Spanish word for “hope”.

“In line with her wishes, I suggest calling her an” Esperanza patient “to send a message of hope to find a cure for HIV-1 infection,” the researchers wrote.