Californian woman who contracted HIV 30 years ago was able to self-heal from the virus - ForumDaily
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Californian woman who contracted HIV 30 years ago was able to heal herself from the virus

A woman who was diagnosed with HIV nearly 30 years ago appears to be cured - without medication or a bone marrow transplant. Writes about this Daily Mail.

Photo: Shutterstock

Scientists have studied Lauryn Willenburg for decades, a 66-year-old woman who insists she never took any medication to curb HIV. Doctors say her body fights infection naturally.

But now scientists say she can be “added to the list” of HIV patients, along with “Berlin patient” Timothy Ray Brown and “London patient” Adam Castillejo.

Brown, 54, and Castillejo, 40, both had cancer and received a bone marrow transplant from a donor with HIV-resistant genes to eradicate their disease and the virus that causes AIDS in one fell swoop.

Willenburg, who was diagnosed in 1992, is considered an "elite controller" because she has the rare ability to suppress the virus on her own and has never received any treatment.

Researchers at the Ragon Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MGH) and Harvard have found no traces of HIV in the California woman using standard tests.

Cutting-edge technology that analyzed Willenburg's 1,5 billion blood cells found tiny amounts of the virus, which means she hasn't completely cured HIV. But doctors showed that her immune system rendered the remaining traces unable to reproduce.

Another 63 patients who were not taking antiretroviral drugs also had traces of HIV that could not reproduce.

On the subject: The second in history: doctors managed to cure a man from HIV

The team, whose work was published in the journal Nature, argues that the findings suggest that these people have achieved a "functional cure."

Elite controllers are believed to account for only 0,5% of the 37 million people living with HIV worldwide.

The researchers found that because a virus is encoded in the DNA of these patients, the pathogen cannot make copies of itself. This keeps the virus below detectable levels, making it unavailable for transmission.

Once a person becomes infected with HIV, the virus begins to attack and destroy the immune cells that normally protect the body from infection.

Over the past decade, doctors have become more aware of how to control HIV. The death rate from the disease has dropped sharply since the peak of the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s.

It is treatable, and doctors recommend taking a combination or cocktail of drugs known as antiretroviral therapy or ART.

For six months after taking the medication once a day, a person's viral load will be almost undetectable, but the body will not be able to completely get rid of it.

This is due to the fact that the virus hides in the body, integrating its genetic material into DNA and forming a so-called hidden reservoir.

But ART, which can cause nausea, diarrhea, headaches and fatigue, cannot destroy these reservoirs, but if the HIV patient stops taking the cocktail, the virus can start copying itself again.

Elite controllers have hidden reservoirs, but they don't need to take medication to stop the virus from spreading through the body.

“They naturally support what other people need ART for,” said study author Dr. Matthias Lichterfeld, an infectious disease physician at Ragon.

For the study, the team examined blood samples from 64 elite controllers and 41 HIV patients on ART.

The results showed that in elite controllers, HIV genetic material was found in so-called “gene deserts” of DNA. Here, gene activity is low, so the virus cannot copy itself and instead remains in a "blocked" state.

Lead author Dr. Xu Yu, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, said: "This arrangement of viral genomes in elite controllers is very atypical:" The vast majority of people living with HIV-1 have HIV in active human genes, where viruses can easily be produced. " ...

Dr. Yu calls this "functional treatment," which happens when the virus is still in the body but can be fought without medication.

The researchers believe this is due to the fact that in the early days of infection, the immune system of elite controllers kills the virus after it integrates into DNA regions with high gene activity.

The team says the results could lead to a cure, either by creating drugs that replicate the phenomenon of elite controllers, or eliminate HIV, which is integrated into parts of DNA that have significant gene activity.

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Elite controllers carry the CCR5 mutation that inhibits its expression, which in fact completely blocks the gene. Experts say the genetic quirk originated from northern Europeans.

The study was conducted after a Brazilian man in his 30s with HIV went into long-term remission after being treated with medications and vitamin B3.

Last month, doctors uncovered the case of the "São Paulo patient," considered the world's first HIV patient to go into remission after pharmaceutical treatment.

And last year, scientists found that a third HIV-positive patient in Germany recovered from the virus after undergoing a risky bone marrow transplant.

But neither the São Paulo patient nor the Düsseldorf patient lived long enough without the virus to be considered cured.

For example, cancer patients must be in remission for five years before they are marked as cured.

Unfortunately, patient cases in Berlin and London do not make much of a difference in reality for millions of people living with HIV.

It is unlikely that this treatment will have the potential on a broader scale because both Mr Castillejo and Mr Ray Brown were given stem cells to treat cancer, not HIV.

Stem cell and bone marrow transplants are life-threatening operations with enormous risks.

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