for the second time, an HIV-positive patient recovered from HIV without any treatment

Tested positive for HIV eight years ago, a young woman from Argentina managed to recover without any treatment, according to a study published Tuesday in an American scientific journal, Annals of Internal Medicine. This is the second case of its kind observed in the world.

This young woman was diagnosed with HIV in 2013. Since then, she has never taken antiretroviral treatment, except during the few months of her pregnancy in 2017, to limit the risk of transmitting the virus to her child.

The thirty-something had been followed by American researchers for several years. She regularly donated cells from her blood or tissues and it was by analyzing recent samples that scientists noticed that they no longer contained any trace of the virus, completely eliminated from these cells which usually serve as its reservoir.

This is a natural cure that had so far only been documented in another case, in 2020. A 67-year-old Californian woman also managed to eliminate the virus naturally. These two cases of cure without treatment open up new avenues of research and in particular identify in detail the immune mechanisms at play in these people, in order perhaps to propose new treatments in the long term.