A woman’s immune system may have cured her of HIV. Scientists call her the ‘hope patient’
- The 30-year-old from Argentina is just the second documented person to recover from the deadly disease in this fashion, without getting a stem cell transplant
- The ‘Esperenza patient’, who had a HIV-negative baby last year, has received no regular treatment for eight years and shows no signs of active infection
A woman from Argentina is being characterised by researchers as a “hope patient” after her own immune system appears to have cured the 30-year old of her own HIV.
The patient becomes just the second documented person whose immune system combated the deadly disease in this fashion – achieving a “sterilising cure” without any form of stem cell transplant.
The woman, who has been nicknamed the “Esperanza patient” for her representation of hope, provided blood samples to be analysed between 2017 and 2020. She had 1.2 billion of her blood cells searched and 500 million placenta-tissue cells searched after she gave birth to an HIV-negative baby in March 2020.
Co-authors of the peer-reviewed study, which published on Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine, said they believe their findings will bring hope for a long-term cure to the nearly 38 million people globally afflicted by the virus.
“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),” Dr Xu Yu, a viral immunologist at the Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT and Harvard, told CNN.