A 30-year-old Argentine woman appears to have become the second documented person whose body may have eliminated her HIV on its own, a study says.
Scans of more than 1 billion of the woman’s cells detected no viable virus, even though for most of the time she was not undergoing antiretroviral therapy meant to keep the virus from replicating. The finding raises the possibility that a person’s own immune system may in rare cases provide a sterilizing cure — the elimination of virus capable of copying itself — the researchers wrote.
“What happened is unique,” said Steven Deeks, an HIV researcher at the University of California at San Francisco, who was not involved in the study. “It’s not that she’s controlling the virus, which we do see, but that there’s no virus there, which is quite different.”
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