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Timothy Ray Brown, the first person known to have been cured of HIV infection, says he is now terminally ill due to a recurrence of the cancer that prompted his historic treatment 12 years ago.
Brown, nicknamed “the Berlin patient” because of where he lived at the time, received a transplant from a donor with a rare natural resistance to the AIDS virus. For years, it was thought that he had cured his leukemia and his HIV infection. and still shows no signs of HIV.
But in an interview with The Associated Press, Brown said his cancer returned last year and has spread widely. He receives hospice care where he now lives in Palm Springs, California.
“I’m still glad I had it,” Brown said of his transplant.
“It opened doors that didn’t exist before” and inspired scientists to work harder to find a cure, which many had begun to think was not possible, the 54-year-old said Thursday.
“Timothy proved that HIV can be cured, but that’s not what inspires me about him,” said Dr. Steven Deeks, an AIDS specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, who has worked with Brown to further research into a cure.
“We took fragments of his gut, we took fragments of his lymph nodes. Every time he was asked to do something, he appeared with amazing grace,” Deeks said.
Brown was an American working as a translator in Berlin in the 1990s when he found out he had HIV. In 2006, he was diagnosed with leukemia.
Dr. Gero Huetter, a blood cancer expert at the University of Berlin, believed that a bone marrow transplant was Brown’s best chance of beating leukemia. He wondered if he could also cure Brown’s other life-threatening disease using a donor with a genetic mutation that provides natural resistance to the AIDS virus.
Donors like these are very rare, and transplants are risky. Doctors have to destroy the patient’s diseased immune system with chemotherapy and radiation, then transplant the donor cells and wait for them to develop into a new immune system for the recipient.
Brown’s first transplant in 2007 was only partially successful: His HIV seemed to be gone, but his leukemia was not. He had a second transplant from the same donor in March 2008 and that one seemed to work.
Since then, Brown has repeatedly tested negative for HIV and has appeared frequently at AIDS conferences where research on a cure is discussed.
“He’s been like an ambassador of hope,” said Brown’s partner Tim Hoeffgen.
A second man, Adam Castillejo, called “the London patient” until he revealed his identity earlier this year, is believed to have also been cured with a transplant similar to Brown’s in 2016.
But donors like these are in short supply and the procedure is too risky to be widely used.
Scientists have been testing gene therapy and other ways to try to get the effect of the favorable gene mutation without having to do a transplant. At an AIDS conference in July, researchers said they may have achieved long-term remission in a Brazilian man by using a powerful combination of drugs aimed at eliminating latent HIV from his body.
Mark King, a Baltimore man who blogs for people with HIV, said he spoke with Brown earlier this week and is grateful for Brown’s contribution to AIDS research.
“The value he has had to the world as a subject of science is unfathomable. And yet this is also a human being who is a kind and humble guy who certainly never asked to be the center of attention,” King said. “I think the world of him.” – AP
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