Woman appears to be third patient cured of HIV, scientists say



A middle-aged woman is believed to be the third patient cured of HIV, scientists say.

What are the details?

A Wednesday report from the Washington Post states that the mixed-race woman received a stem cell transplant harvested from an infant's umbilical cord blood ahead of her potential curing.

The virus, according to the report, has been in remission for four years, and she has not taken an antiretroviral drugs for the infection in 14 months.

The case was reported at an annual meeting of the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infection and is said to mark the very first time a stem cell transplant approach has been successful in a mixed-race woman — an advance, the Post reported, "that reinforces the exciting concept that an HIV cure may be possible in a wider array of people by using cord blood."

Dr. Yvonne J. Bryson, an infectious diseases expert at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine, presented the case and said that the findings should be encouraging for all infected with HIV.

During a press conference ABC News reported, Bryson said, "Today, we reported the third known case of HIV remission and the first woman following a stem cell transplant and using HIV-resistant cells."

"This case is special for several reasons: First, our participant was a U.S. woman living with HIV of mixed race, who needed a stem cell transplant for treatment of her leukemia. And she would find a more difficult time finding both a genetic match and one with the HIV-resistant mutation to both cure her cancer and potentially her HIV. This is a natural, but rare mutation."

"This provides hope for the use of cord blood cells ... to achieve HIV remission for the individuals requiring transplant for other diseases," she explained. "This provides additional proof that HIV reservoirs can be cleared sufficiently to afford remission and cure."

Scientists in 2009 reported that a white man diagnosed with leukemia had possibly been cured of HIV with a stem cell transplant. In 2019, scientists carried out the same treatment on an HIV-positive Hispanic man.

Emory University School of Medicine Professor Carlos del Rio said that the development is "critical science" that should lead scientists down the path for a permanent cure for HIV.

“This is not a scalable intervention," he explained. "The way I think about this: This is like sending someone on a rocket to the moon. It’s great science, but it’s not the way we’re going to travel.”

Sharon Lewin, president-elect of the International AIDS Society, told the Post that the news has been enlightening and encouraging.

“A bone-marrow transplant is not a viable large-scale strategy for curing HIV, but it does present a proof of concept that HIV can be cured. It also further strengthens using gene therapy as a viable strategy for an HIV cure,” Lewin said.

What else?

Dr. Anthony Fauci, infectious diseases expert, said in response to the news that he doesn't want HIV-positive patients to pre-emptively celebrate.

"I don't want people to think that now this is something that can be applied to the 36 million people [globally] who are living with HIV," he cautioned. "This person had an underlying disease that required a stem cell transplant. ... It is not practical to think that this is something that's going to be widely available. It's more of a proof of concept."

In December, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first-ever long-acting injection for HIV prevention.

'Hope patient' from Argentina possibly cured of HIV after her body fought it off



A 30-year-old HIV patient from Esperanza, Argentina, is being called a "hope patient" by researchers after her own body fought off the deadly disease and appears to be cured.

This patient is only the second person known to researchers whose immune system was capable of achieving a "sterilizing cure" for the human immunodeficiency virus without receiving regular treatment for her infection. According to CNN, the woman is a rare "elite controller" of the virus who, after she was first diagnosed eight years ago, now shows no signs of intact virus in her body.

The patient's case was reported by researchers in the Annals of Internal Medicine. She was first diagnosed with HIV in March 2013. She did not start an antiretroviral treatment until 2019, when she became pregnant and was treated with the drugs tenofovir, emtricitabine, and raltegravir for six months during her second and third trimesters. When she gave birth in 2020, her baby was HIV-negative.

Researchers analyzed blood samples taken from the woman between 2017 and 2020. More than 1.2 billion of her blood cells were searched and 500 million placenta-tissue cells searched after she gave birth. Although there was evidence that she had been infected with HIV before, researchers could not find an intact virus that was capable of replicating in her body. All they found were seven defective proviruses — a form of virus that is integrated into the genetic material of a host cell as part of the replication cycle, CNN reports.

"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 (or any type of treatment at all)," said Dr. Xu Yu, an author of the study.

"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," Yu told CNN in an email.

Researchers are not entirely sure how the woman's body was able to cure itself of HIV, but "we think it's a combination of different immune mechanisms -- cytotoxic T cells are likely involved, innate immune mechanism may also have contributed," Yu said.

They are hopeful that studying this patient's immune response could lead to new treatments or even a cure for the 38 million people around the world living with HIV infection.

"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 broader population of HIV infected individuals," said Yu.