A woman in Argentina has become only the second reported individual to be cured of HIV by her own immune system.
The 30-year-old mother, who was diagnosed with HIV in 2013, has been dubbed the "Esperanza patient" after the town where she lives in Argentina. "Esperanza" means "hope" in English.
An international team of researchers has been scouring the patient's DNA for traces of the virus since 2017. STAT reported that they even analyzed her placenta after she gave birth in March 2020. Scientists have confirmed that the woman is HIV-free after sequencing billions of cells.
Many people can now live with the virus under control thanks to modern medicine, but they still need to take antiretroviral therapy on a regular basis to keep it from replicating.
Four people have been said to have been "cured" of HIV throughout history. Two of them, the "Berlin Patient" and the "London Patient," were cured after getting stem cell transplants, a risky procedure that doctors have unsuccessfully attempted to repeat with other patients.
Only once before have scientists found a confirmed case of someone entirely eradicating the virus from their system. In 2020, scientists published a report on Loreen Willenburg, dubbed the "San Francisco Patient" by doctors, who was the first case of a sterilizing cure without a medical intervention.
The study's co-authors, who published their findings in the Annals of Internal Medicine on Monday, believe their findings will give hope to the estimated 38 million people living with the virus worldwide, as well as the ever-expanding HIV-cure research field. The case is one of two proofs of concept that a virus sterilizing cure is presumably attainable through natural immunity.
"This is really the miracle of the human immune system that did it," Xu Yu, a viral immunologist at the Ragon Institute in Boston who led the study, said. Yu is working with Natalia Laufer, an INBIRS Institute physician scientist in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Yu was also the lead author of a paper published in Nature in August 2020 that looked at 64 people, including the Argentine woman, who are considered elite controllers of HIV.
Elite controllers are among the 1 in 200 HIV patients whose immune systems are able to suppress the virus's replication to extremely low levels without the use of antiretrovirals.
The authors of that study discovered that these people's immune systems seemed to preferentially destroy cells that housed HIV and were capable of creating viable new copies of the virus.
One priority for Yu's group is to track down more of these elite controllers and naturally cured people to learn more about their biology.
