HIV was supposed to kill them. Now they could help scientists find a cure.
Without getting treatment, HIV infections can eventually develop into AIDS — the stage in which a person’s immune system has deteriorated to the point that they become vulnerable to typically harmless infections and rare cancers.
Key points
- “There are a lot of tools to fight HIV, but it’s also evident that this is not enough,” said Asier Saez-Cirion, leader of the Viral Reservoirs and Immune Control Unit at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.
- The elite controllers of HIV Joel Blankson, an associate professor of medicine specializing in infectious diseases at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, remembers when he encountered an HIV elite controller for the first time.
- Normally, as an HIV infection progresses, the virus infiltrates key immune cells, known as CD4 T cells, hijacking their internal machinery to make more copies of itself, and killing the host cells in the process.
For many scientists, this group of people provides a roadmap for a so-called functional cure, a state akin to cancer remission, where the infection is under control, but not completely eliminated.
Additional details
- A few years earlier, Bruce Walker, a physician-scientist and director of the Ragon Institute of Mass General Brigham, MIT, and Harvard, had been similarly astounded by a patient who had been HIV positive for 16 years with no signs of disease.
- But HIV is exceptionally good at evading the immune system’s defenses, so the research community was glad to see that there were some people who seemed to be able to naturally fight off HIV.
- Today’s clinicians now have an arsenal of effective medications to both prevent and treat HIV infections.
- Years passed, and Boakye watched as both his former partner and many of his friends died of complications from HIV, which infiltrates immune cells and weakens the body’s defenses.
- For any virus, whether it’s HIV or influenza or Covid-19, people have a range of responses — some people become severely ill while others may have no symptoms at all.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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