A 30-year-old Argentinian woman may hold the key to curing HIV.
A recent study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that the woman – a resident of Esperanza, Argentina – had “no genome-intact HIV-1 proviruses,” in blood and tissue samples taken from the patient as well as placenta collected when she gave birth to a baby last year. They did find defective proviruses “a form of a virus that is integrated into the genetic material of a host cell as part of the replication cycle,” that can’t replicate.
Her body essentially eradicated the virus.
“HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) is a virus that attacks the body’s immune system,” said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “If HIV is not treated, it can lead to AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome).”
Currently, there is no effective cure for HIV. Some people develop flu-like symptoms soon after they become infected with the virus and could live for years with asymptomatic infection. If they develop AIDS, people typically can live for three years without treatment.
An estimated 1.19 million people in the U.S. had HIV at the end of 2019.
According to CNN, the recent study was conducted eight years after the subject patient was diagnosed with HIV and had no regular treatment for the condition. When she became pregnant in 2019, the patient started antiretroviral treatment. She took these drugs for six months during her second and third trimesters and stopped after delivering a healthy HIV-negative baby.
This study marks second time a “sterilizing cure” of HIV has been observed, said researchers. When a “sterilizing cure” occurs, a virus is eradicated by its host. In contrast, a “functional cure” occurs when a virus is controlled by host factors but still present, which happens with herpes viruses.
“These observations raise the possibility that a sterilizing cure may be an extremely rare but possible outcome of HIV-1 infection,” said researchers of the two HIV patients.
When a patient’s body is able to control viral replication to below the limits of detection by commercial assays without antiretroviral therapy (ART), they are called “elite suppressors” or “elite controllers” and could represent a model cure for HIV. However, fewer than 1 percent of people living with HIV are in this category.
CNN said the other woman identified as an “elite controller” of HIV was a 67-year-old woman named Loreen Willenberg. Outside of these two patients, similar results were achieved with a bone marrow transplant.
“A sterilizing cure for HIV has previously only been observed in two patients who received a highly toxic bone marrow transplant,” said Dr. Xu Yu, of the Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT and Harvard, who was an author of the study, in an email to CNN on Monday. “Our study shows that such a cure can also be reached during natural infection -- in the absence of bone marrow transplants (or any type of treatment at all).”
Although researchers are not certain how elite controllers eradicate HIV, Yu said it could be a mix of different immune mechanisms such as cytotoxic T cells and innate immune mechanism.
"Examples of such a cure that develops naturally suggest that current efforts to find a cure for HIV infection are not elusive, and that the prospects of getting to an 'AIDS-free generation' may ultimately be successful," said Yu.
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