In a press release published on its social networks, the public hospitals of Marseille announced that a patient treated at the Sainte-Marguerite establishment was in remission from HIV. “More significant hindsight is, however, necessary to consolidate these results,” they specified.
A first in France. In a press release published on social networks, caregivers at public hospitals in Marseille announced that a sixty-year-old woman being treated at Sainte-Marguerite was in remission from HIV. “We can already speak of remission of HIV infection and a potential case of cure”, they wrote, but “a greater distance is however necessary to consolidate these results”, they qualified .
Testing HIV positive in 1999, the patient subsequently underwent antiretroviral treatment, only showed improvements from 2010, “with a viral load that became undetectable,” health professionals assured. However, in February 2020, she contracted acute myeloid leukemia, and five months later, she underwent an allogeneic bone marrow transplant.
The team from the Paoli-Calmettes Institute manages to find a compatible donor, but with a mutation affecting a gene, preventing him from contracting HIV. Declared in remission from her leukemia, the woman then continued her antiretroviral treatment for approximately three years after the intervention. Subjected to “more extensive” virological examinations, the tests turned out to be negative for the virus.
-Eight HIV cures worldwide
“We decided collectively in a multidisciplinary consultation meeting bringing together HIV specialists, virologists, immunologists and hematologists, to stop antiretroviral treatment” in October 2023, declared the doctors.
As stated by Doctor Sylvie Bregigeon, head of the Information and Care Center for Human Immunodeficiency and Viral Hepatitis (CISIH) to France 3 Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, the sixty-year-old “is very “Well, she is very happy to have been cured of her leukemia and potentially cured of her HIV infection.”
This woman would become the eighth person in the world to recover from the disease if the results are confirmed. While this allograft system is not suitable for all patients infected with the virus, “the fact remains that these exceptional cases of remission allow an ever finer understanding of the functioning of HIV and contribute greatly to opening new research perspectives.
