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Timothy Ray Brown, the first person known to be cured of HIV when he underwent a unique type of bone marrow transplant, died in California after a cancer relapse, his partner said.
“It is with great sadness to announce that Timothy passed away … this afternoon surrounded by friends and myself, after a 5-month battle with leukemia,” his partner Tim Hoeffgen said in a Facebook post.
Brown, born March 11, 1966, became known as the “Berlin Patient” after his HIV was eradicated by treatment there in 2007.
The American’s case fascinated and inspired a generation of HIV doctors, as well as patients infected with the virus that causes AIDS, offering a glimmer of hope that one day a cure will be found that will finally end the AIDS pandemic. .
Adeeba Kamarulzaman, president of the International AIDS Society, said she would mourn Brown “with a deeply heavy heart.” “We owe Timothy and his physician, Gero Huetter, great gratitude for opening the door for scientists to explore the concept that a cure for HIV is possible,” said Kamarulzaman, who is also a professor of medicine and infectious diseases at Malay. College.
Brown was diagnosed with HIV in 1995 while living in the German capital, and in 2006 he was also diagnosed with a type of blood cancer known as acute myeloid leukemia.
While Brown remained HIV-free for more than a decade after receiving treatment, he had suffered a relapse of leukemia in the past year. His doctors said the blood cancer had spread to his spine and brain, and he had recently been in hospice care in his hometown of Palm Springs, California.
For Huetter, the German doctor who treated him in 2007, Brown’s case was a shot in the dark. The treatment involved the destruction of Brown’s immune system and the transplantation of stem cells with a genetic mutation called CCR5 that resists HIV.
Only a small proportion of people, mostly of northern European descent, have the CCR5 mutation that makes them resistant to the virus that causes AIDS.
This and other factors made Brown’s treatment expensive, complex, and high-risk. Most experts say that it could never become a way to cure all HIV patients, as many of them would risk dying from the procedure itself.
More than 37 million people around the world are currently infected with HIV, and the AIDS pandemic has killed an estimated 35 million people since it began in the 1980s.
Medical advances in the past three decades have led to the development of drug combinations known as antiretroviral therapies that can keep the virus in check, allowing many HIV-positive people to live with the virus for years.
A second HIV patient, Adam Castillejo, known as “the London patient” until he revealed his identity this year, is also believed to be in remission from HIV after receiving a transplant in 2016 similar to the one Brown had.
“Although the Timothy and Adam cases are not a viable large-scale strategy for a cure, they represent a critical moment in the search for a cure for HIV,” said Sharon Lewin, Professor and HIV Specialist at the Doherty Institute in Australia. .
She said Brown was “a champion and advocate for keeping the HIV cure on the political and scientific agenda,” adding:
“The scientific community hopes that one day we can honor his legacy with a safe, cost-effective, and widely accessible strategy to achieve remission and a cure for HIV.”
