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First entry: Wednesday, September 30, 2020, 1:11 PM
Timothy Ray Brown, the world’s first person to be cured of HIV by undergoing a rare bone marrow transplant, died in California after a relapse of his cancer, his partner said.
“It is with great sadness that I announce that Timothy died … at noon with me and his friends after a five-month battle with leukemia,” his partner Tim Hefgen said in a Facebook post.
Born on March 11, 1966, Brown became known as “The Berlin Patient” because he was cured of HIV in that city in 2007.
His case has impressed and inspired a generation of doctors who have dealt with HIV, but also patients infected with the virus that causes AIDS, offering a ray of hope that one day a cure will be found and fought. the AIDS pandemic.
Antiba Kamarulzaman, president of the International Union Against AIDS, said she regretted Brown “with great regret.” “We owe it to Timothy and his doctor, Gero Heather, to open the door for scientists to explore the idea that a cure for HIV is possible,” said Kamarulzaman, who is also a professor of medicine and infectious diseases at the University of Malaya. . .
Brown was diagnosed with HIV in 1995 while living in the German capital and in 2006 he was also diagnosed with a form of blood cancer known as acute myeloid leukemia.
Although Brown had been HIV-free for more than a decade after his treatment, he had recurrent leukemia last year. Doctors told him that the cancer had metastasized to his spine and brain and that he had recently been receiving palliative care at his home in Palm Springs, California.
For Heather, the German doctor who treated him in 2007, Brown’s case was like shooting in the dark. Treatment included suppression of Brown’s immune system and transplantation of stem cells with a mutation in a gene, CCR5, that is resistant to HIV.
Only a handful of people, most of northern European descent, have the CCR5 mutation, making them resistant to the virus that causes AIDS.
He and other factors made Brown’s treatment expensive, complex and extremely risky.
Most experts say that there will never be a way to cure HIV patients, as many of them will risk dying in the process.
More than 37 million people around the world have been infected with HIV, and the AIDS pandemic has claimed the lives of some 35 million people since the disease first appeared in the 1980s.
Scientific advances in the last three decades have led to the development of combination drugs, known as antiretroviral therapy, that can keep the virus in check, allowing many carriers of the virus to live for years carrying it.
A second HIV patient, Adam Castillegio, known as “The London Patient” until his identity was revealed this year, is also believed to have been HIV-free after undergoing a transplant similar to Brown’s in 2016.
