A woman may have defeated HIV without any medical treatment

The patient hasn't had any detectable HIV in her cells for decades. Some experts believe it may have eradicated the virus without treatment: an exceptional case among the minority of patients who today are found to naturally relegate the virus to non-transcribed areas of the genome

(image: Getty Images) lives together: effective antiretroviral drugs control the infection, but unfortunately it does not heal. This is true for the vast majority of patients, except for a couple of cases - the London and Berlin patients - who were declared cured after undergoing a bone marrow transplant, which made them resistant to infection. And it is also recent the case of the patient of Sao Paulo who seems (but is still to be ascertained) to have defeated the virus after an experimental and very aggressive treatment with antiretroviral drugs.

Today, however, news arrives that has some incredible, an exception to the rule: a 66-year-old woman for decades would no longer have detectable traces of HIV in her body and without having taken drugs or having undergone other treatments. This was announced in Nature by a team of US researchers, citing the case in a larger study that compared millions of cells of HIV-positive people on antiretroviral therapy with those of the so-called elite controllers, i.e. a minority of HIV-positive patients (0, 5-1% of the total) whose immune system can control HIV by itself. Scientists have discovered that in elite controllers the genes of the virus are relegated to silenced portions of the cellular genome, thus eliminating the possibility of the virus to replicate. The discovery rekindles the hope of a functional cure also in other categories of patients, which number about 37 million worldwide.