Timothy Ray Brown, 52, would be remembered as the first man in the world to be cured of the virus that causes Aids.
The historic cure popularly known as ‘Bown cure’ formerly known as the Berlin Patient happened in 2017 Brown. The man now lives in Palm Springs, California.
Once it became clear that Brown was cured, scientists set out to duplicate his result with other cancer patients infected with HIV.
The failures left scientists wondering whether Brown’s cure would remain a fluke.
Brown had leukemia, and after chemotherapy failed to stop it, needed two bone-marrow transplants.
The transplants were from a donor with a mutation in a protein called CCR5, which rests on the surface of certain immune cells. HIV uses the protein to enter those cells but cannot latch on to the mutated version.
Brown was given harsh immunosuppressive drugs of a kind that are no longer used, and suffered intense complications for months after the transplant.
He was placed in an induced coma at one point and nearly died.
“He was really beaten up by the whole procedure,” said Dr. Steven Deeks, an AIDS expert at the University of California, San Francisco, who has treated Brown.
“And so we’ve always wondered whether all that conditioning, a massive amount of destruction to his immune system, explained why Timothy was cured but no one else.”
The London patient has answered that question: A near-death experience is not required for the procedure to work.
He had Hodgkin lymphoma and received a bone-marrow transplant from a donor with the CCR5 mutation in May 2016.