A 30-year-old Argentine woman was diagnosed with HIV (HIV) in 2013 and is now considered the second person to could have got rid of the disease naturally, this according to a study published by scientists this Monday, November 15 in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
The text details that the patient, originally from the city of Esperanza, has not been regularly medicated or received stem cells to treat the infection; the team of scientists in charge of the study found that the woman showed no traces of the virus or signs of the disease in large numbers of his cells, so it could have naturally neutralized it: doctors call this process “sterilizing cure“.
According to what was published, the woman was given aAnalysis of billions of cells in tissue and blood samples and these threw that if you had previously had HIV, but now researchers they no longer found traces of the virus that could be replicated in your body. This type of patient is known as “elite controllers“.
How were you “cured” of HIV?
The patient was diagnosed with HIV in 2013, but did not receive any antiretroviral drugs until 2019, when she became pregnant and received doses of tenofovir, emtricitabine and rategravir in the last two trimesters of pregnancy; after in March 2020 she gave birth to a healthy boy who tested negative for the virus, and discontinued treatment.
Doctors in charge collected blood and tissue samples between 2017 and 2020, Besides that when she became a mother, she also took part of the placenta for analysis. After conducting several studies, it was that the specialists found that there were no longer traces of HIV in the woman’s body.
CNN spoke with Dr. Xu Yu, of the Ragon Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT and Harvard, who is the author of the study and he reported that they still do not know how it was that the patient was “cured” of HIV but it is very likely that this was possible thanks to the combination of different mechanisms in the immune system; This would represent an important advance in science and in the possibility of detecting these factors in people with HIV that could lead to a “sterilizing cure.”
Second case of “stelirilizing cure”
This would be the second case of a person who is cured of HIV without taking medication. It was only in August 2020 that it became known that Loren willenberg, a 66-year-old Californian woman who had been diagnosed in 1992 succeeded in suppressing the disease without the need for treatment or an aggressive and risky bone marrow transplant.
Loreen’s case was published in Nature Magazine on August 16 of last year and then it was explained that apparently HIV had been isolated in the woman’s body in such a way that it was not possible for it to reproduce. Back then, The New York Times reports, doctors considered that T lymphocytes they had eliminated the cells where the virus had lodged, an explanation similar to the one now given with the news of the Argentine patient who was also “cured” of HIV.
KEEP READING:
Immunosuppressed people would need fourth dose of Covid-19 vaccine: CDC
Danger of contagion: what is it and how could it land you in jail if you have HIV?
