Second HIV Patient Found Virus-Free
The second patient to have “naturally” been cured of HIV (naturally meaning without taking drugs or receiving a bone-marrow transplant) has been identified, according to a report published in Annals of Internal Medicine.
The patient, a 31-year-old woman, was diagnosed with HIV in 2013 but never showed any sign of sickness. Doctors have been examining her blood and tissue samples since 2017, and several weeks ago, it was reported that no traces of the virus have been found.
Two people have been effectively cured of HIV, though the procedure was done using bone marrow transplants from donors with anti-HIV mutations. “The Esperanza patient” as she is known, is the second woman who has apparently cleared the virus from their body without the use of drugs or a bone marrow transplant. The first, known as “the San Francisco patient,” was described by Dr. Xu Yu’s team in a 2020 paper.
“There is no way to ever say that we have proof that there is not a single virus in the patient,” says leading researcher Dr. Yu. However, her research team has not been able to find any evidence of virus in the patient after analyzing around 1.5 billion blood and tissue cells, only antibodies that provided evidence the patient was indeed infected with HIV at one point. This was similarly found in the San Francisco patient.
The Esperanza patient is currently pregnant with her second child. Dr. Yu’s team is currently discussing whether her apparent HIV-free status means that she won’t have to take any anti-HIV drugs during her pregnancy and delivery. She took antiretroviral drugs to prevent potential transmission during her first pregnancy in 2020.
Yu emphasizes that these findings may not represent a commonality in all HIV patients. These two patients belong to a group called elite controllers, patients who are able to suppress HIV at nearly undetectable levels with only their immune systems. Researchers have been studying elite controllers since the 1990s, though they haven’t yet pinpointed what is keeping the levels of virus in these patients low. Dr. Yu is hoping to attract more patients to help the researchers understand which aspects of their immune system could provide potential treatments.
