HIV Patient Cleared Of The Virus Without Any Antiviral Drugs – Report

A group of researchers have recently revealed an HIV patient that got cleared of the virus without using any antiviral drug.

According to the report published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine, a 31-year-old woman who’s from Esperanza, Argentina, was diagnosed with HIV in 2013 only took antiretroviral therapy for six months during pregnancy to prevent transmitting the infection to her baby. Yet multiple sophisticated tests looking for genetic evidence of HIV in the patient’s blood showed no intact virus in her cells.

The findings suggest that the patient’s immune system was even able to clear the reservoirs of HIV that allow the virus to continue replicating for decades. Current anti-HIV drugs can lower virus levels to undetectable levels but can’t completely rid the body of these lingering reservoirs of the virus.

“There is no way to ever say we have proof that there is not a single virus in this patient. The only thing we can say is that after analyzing a large number of cells from the patient, with the technology in our lab we cannot reject the hypothesis that the patient probably reached a sterilizing cure by natural immunity,” says Dr Xu Yu, who led the research team reporting on the case.

According to the report, the patient will continue to provide blood samples for ongoing research studies and will also provide the team with samples of her breast milk so the scientists can determine if it contains any virus as she is currently pregnant with her second child.

However, this is not the first time a patient has gotten cleared of the virus without taking any antiviral drug.  prior to this  Esperanza patient, there was a San Francisco patient that had a similar experience in 2020.