Scientists in the United States say they have probably located a second patient whose body appears to have completely “got rid” of the HIV virus – which causes AIDS – in a natural way, without a previous stem cell transplant. The patient’s body no longer shows any traces of the virus genome.
Researchers at MIT and Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital, led by Dr. Su Yu, called him an “Esperanza patient” (city of Argentina) and published them in the Annals of Internal Medicine. , reported that they analyzed almost 1.2 million blood cells and 503 million tissue cells, without finding the slightest trace of HIV.
During infection, HIV inserts copies of its genome into the DNA of human cells, creating a “reservoir” of it. In this way, the virus is effectively hidden by anti-HIV drugs and by the immune system reactions of patients.
In most patients, new virus particles are constantly springing up from this “reservoir”. Anti-retroviral therapy (ART) cannot eliminate the “reservoir”, so daily medication is necessary to suppress the virus.
However, some patients have an immune system capable of suppressing HIV without the need for medication. Although they still have the viral “reservoir”, they have killer T-cells that are able to suppress the virus on their own, without the help of drugs.
In 2020, Su Yu’s research team first reported in the journal Nature that a 67-year-old woman had been diagnosed with HIV 30 years ago and was named a “San Francisco Patient”, in which there was good evidence that she had been eliminated. and the “reservoir”, 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 having preceded a stem cell transplant (as had happened with the “patient of Berlin”, 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, and later became known as similar case of Adam Castilejo or “London patient”).
Now, the same American scientific team has reported a second possibly similar case, the “Esperanto patient”, who appears to have gotten rid of HIV without outside intervention. According to the British “Daily Mail”, this is a 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.”
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