Experts find second HIV patient who got cured of AIDS without treatment: Reports

In what can be considered as a remarkable breakthrough in the treatment of AIDS, an international team of researchers has claimed to have found a patient who naturally got rid of the perilous Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) causing it. A report by CNN suggests that the patient is a 30-year-old woman from Esperanza in Argentina and got cured of the disease without serious medication for treatment.

Eight years after first being diagnosed with AIDS, the woman no more shows any symptoms and is walking free. Since there is no cure for the disease till now, experts believe that these findings will help in breeding an AIDS-free generation. It is estimated that nearly 7,00,000 people died of the virus in 2020 alone and around 40 million people are living with HIV today.

Only the second woman to naturally recover from AIDS

Published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, the study conducted by the international team of experts revealed that this woman is the second patient to naturally defeat the HIV virus. The first patient was also a woman named Loreen Willenberg who recovered from the disease at the age of 67. This woman on the other hand was first diagnosed with AIDS in 2013 and eight years later, shows no signs of the virus in her body. As per CNN, co-author of the study Dr Xu Yu reflected on the intriguing case saying-

A sterilizing cure for HIV has previously only been observed in two patients who received a highly toxic bone marrow transplant. Our study shows that such a cure can also be reached during natural infection, in the absence of bone marrow transplants. 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. 

Reportedly, the researchers were able to study the woman’s blood samples from 2017 and the placental tissue till the date she delivered a baby in March 2020. As per the experts, the woman delivered a healthy HIV-negative baby despite taking no anti-retroviral drug till 2019 and only during the first and second trimester of her pregnancy. 

It is unclear what factors helped in wiping the virus out of the woman’s system although Yu speculated that “it's a combination of different immune mechanisms -- cytotoxic T cells are likely involved, the innate immune mechanism may also have contributed”. He further told CNN that “expanding the numbers of individuals with possible sterilizing cure status would facilitate our discovery of the immune factors that lead to this sterilizing cure in the broader population of HIV infected individuals”.

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