Nature: Can AIDS heal itself? Scientists found a breakthrough in 0.5 percent of patients.

Read: This study provides "a natural proof of the possibility of functional therapy (HIV)" and offers hope for HIV-infected people to better control the virus in their bodies.
(HIV), or AIDS virus, is a virus that causes deficiencies in the human immune system.
the virus paralyses the body's immune system by attacking CD4 T cells, the commanding center of the body's immune system, and patients often need antiretroviral therapy (ART) to control the progression of the disease.
, however, there are always exceptions to everything.
about 0.5 percent of people living with HIV seem to have natural control over the virus and are well placed to inhibit the virus from replicating in the body without ART treatment, known as "elite controllers."
August 26, local time, a team of researchers at the Ragon Institute in the United States published an article in Nature entitled "Distinct Viruses in individuals with spontaneous control of HIV-1", which offered hope of treatment or even cure to 99.5 percent of HIV patients by comparing the library of viruses in elite and ART controllers.
more importantly, one of the elite controllers did not take ART drugs for 23 years, but no complete pre-virus sequence was found in the body, a condition previously only seen in "Berlin patients", indicating that the patient is most likely to have "self-healed"! The reason the silent ex-virus HIV is difficult to eradicate is that it inserts its genetic information into the human genome, becomes a so-called "pre-virus" and lurks for a long time waiting for the right time to "activate".
, HIV-infected people need to take ART drugs to suppress virus replication, why can elite controllers do this without the need for "external forces"? To explore the reasons, the researchers conducted pre-viral genomic analysis of 64 elite controllers and 41 patients treated with ART drugs and found that although elite controllers had fewer pre-viruses in their bodies, the proportion of pre-genome pre-virus sequences was higher, and even four elite controllers had a complete pre-virus sequence accounting for 100 percent of detected pre-virus species, indicating their potential to produce infectious virus particles at transcription.
note that these pre-viruses show more limited evidence of mutation escape, indicating that they are seeded early in the disease process and long-term.
HIV-1 Elite Controller's Ex-Virus Library Landscape, the researchers focused on 11 Elite Controllers (EC3-EC13), which not only detected a large number of complete pre-virus sequences of the same genome from their bodies, but also found that the virus library in their bodies was more similar to the oligoclonal structure of the genome complete prea bout sequence virus library, characterized by a deep incubation period of pregenuations, limiting the active transcription and replication of viruses.
, the complete sequence of pre-viruses from elite controllers may maintain a deep and long incubation period.
speculated that this may be due to chromosomes being integrated into genomic regions that do not allow viruses to be actively transcriptional.
to test this hypothesis, the researchers used matching integrated site and pre-virus sequence (MIP-seq) analysis to study the site at which the virus had been integrated into the host genome.
found that complete pre-viral sequences in elite controllers were more likely to be integrated into non-protein coding regions of DNA or in the KRAB-ZNF gene on chromosome 19, which consists of isotromatin with lower transcription activity, which is often not conducive to HIV-1 integration.
this means that HIV is locked in the cell genome and that the viral genome is blocked from being used to make more viruses, so it cannot cause disease.
addition, the researchers analyzed access to chromosome regions, where transcription is possible, and found that viral integration site in the DNA of elite controllers tended to be farther away from the host genome transcription starting point.
also suggests that the genomes of elite controllers are unlikely to actively produce viral transcripts and proteins.
When researchers collected cells from elite controllers and conducted HIV infection experiments in the lab, they found that the virus had been integrated into active bits of the cell genome, suggesting that elite controllers' unique library of viruses may be the result of their HIV-suppressing T-cell response removing the entire virus genome from the active bits.
the choice of sleeping HIV among elite controllers is noteworthy, and the study also reveals a welcome example of "drug-free self-healing."
elite controller did not take ART drugs during a 24-year follow-up, but the 1.5 billion exocytes in his system did not find any complete pre-viral sequences.
While it is not possible to determine whether HIV has been completely eradicated from the patient, it increases the possibility that the subject's immune system has removed all complete HIV genomes from the human body, a treatment that may in rare cases be naturally achieved.
fact, in 2007, researchers at the Pasteur Institute found that CD8 T cells in elite controllers had extraordinary antiviral activity compared to ordinary AIDS patients, rapidly destroying infected CD4 T cells.
12 years later, researchers at the institute, published in Nature Metabolism, suggested that cd8 T cells were able to fight HIV-infected cells in a long and effective way because of an optimal metabolic process, and that cells in normal INDS patients who had been reprogrammed in-body also had the same antiviral effectiveness as elite controller cells.
, a virologist at the University of Pennsylvania, said the "comprehensive and elegant study" provided "natural evidence of the possibility of a functional treatment (HIV)" and offered hope that people living with HIV would have better control over the virus in their bodies.
, the study provides new ideas for the treatment of HIV, suggesting that, at least in principle, HIV-1 infection can be cured spontaneously through natural immuno-mediated mechanisms.
resources: s1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [2] HIV enters deep sleep in people who naturally control the virus . . . HIV: Reprogramming cells to control infection.