Back in 2013, a woman from Esperanza, Argentina, was diagnosed with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), notorious for being the virus that causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). The diagnosis altered the woman’s life, and would impact her for years to come.
The woman, dubbed the “Esperanza Patient,” would join an estimated 37.6 million people across the world who are infected with HIV, according to data from HIV.gov. Of the 37.6 million, some 1.5 million were only diagnosed just that year.
The Esperanza Patient is considered an elite controller, or an HIV-positive patient whose viral load is low enough that they don’t usually develop symptoms from their infection, even in the absence of treatment.
Thing is, something peculiar happened to the Esperanza Patient that left medical professionals stunned; eight years after she was diagnosed with HIV, test results show that the HIV particles inside her body had seemingly vanished. In fact, several tests that “massive numbers of cells from blood and tissues” show the very fact.
What’s even more remarkable is the fact that the Esperanza patient had received no treatment that might have possibly addressed her infection, likely due to her being an elite controller; this makes the Esperanza Patient the second-ever recorded case of a human’s immune system eliminating HIV without intervention via drugs or bone marrow transplant. These one-of-a-kind findings were published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
The first case was recorded just last year in a woman named Loreen Willenberg, who had previously lived with HIV for 27 years before finding out that it had all but vanished from her system. Two other HIV “vanishing acts” were reported in two patients nicknamed the “Berlin Patient” and the “London Patient”; however, these two had undergone stem cell therapy.
“This is really the miracle of the human immune system that did it,” said Ragon Institute immunologist Dr. Xu Yu, who worked together with Buenos Aires-based INBIRS Institute physician scientist Dr. Natalia Laufer in the mysterious case of the Esperanza Patient.
According to Yu, both the Esperanza Patient and Willenberg had their immune system-inherent T-cells hunt down the HIV in their bodies with quite some potency. Despite this, however, scientists exercise caution, and must remind the general public that these results don’t necessarily mean that HIV is now 100% absent from the Esperanza Patient’s body.
“We’re never going to be 100 percent sure there’s absolutely no intact virus, no functional virus anywhere in her body,” said Yu. “To bring what we learn from these patients to a broader patient population is our ultimate goal.”
Ultimately, much research work needs to be done to truly ascertain the truth behind the remarkable events encircling the Esperanza Patient. Despite this, however, the unnamed woman behind the findings continues to see her new lease on life as a sign of hope.
“I enjoy being healthy,” said the Esperanza patient to NBC News. “I have a healthy family. I don’t have to medicate, and I live as though nothing has happened. This already is a privilege.”
(For more health news, check out how a blind woman regained some of her vision using brain implants; afterwards, check out the longest-ever recorded case of COVID-19, which sat at a record-breaking 335 total days of infection.)
References
- HIV.gov. (2021, June 25). Global statistics. HIV.Gov. https://www.hiv.gov/hiv-basics/overview/data-and-trends/global-statistics
- Mandavilli, A. (2020, August 26). A woman may have been cured of h. I. V. Without medical treatment. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/26/health/hiv-cure.html
- Ryan, B. (2021, November 16). Woman’s own immune system has possibly cured her of HIV. NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/womans-immune-system-possibly-cured-hiv-rcna5610
- Thompson, J. (2021, November 20). Patient’s immune system ‘naturally’ cures HIV in the second case of its kind. LiveScience. https://www.livescience.com/hiv-naturally-cured-second-case
- Turk, G., Seiger, K., Lian, X., Sun, W., Parsons, E. M., Gao, C., Rassadkina, Y., Polo, M. L., Czernikier, A., Ghiglione, Y., Vellicce, A., Varriale, J., Lai, J., Yuki, Y., Martin, M., Rhodes, A., Lewin, S. R., Walker, B. D., Carrington, M., … Yu, X. G. (2021). A possible sterilizing cure of hiv-1 infection without stem cell transplantation. Annals of Internal Medicine. https://doi.org/10.7326/L21-0297
