Timothy Brown is said to be the first AIDS infected patient to ever be cured of AIDS! A disease that has long been researched and a cure that didn’t seem like it was going to be attained, seems to have finally been beaten in this case. Hit the jump to read how doctors helped Timothy and if it’s possible to help millions.
Steph Bassanini
Timothy Brown, 46, became the first person in history to be cured of HIV after receiving a blood stem cell transplant from a person resistant to the virus.
In 2007 doctors made the breakthrough surgery as they treated Brown for the leukemia that he had been diagnosed with a year earlier.
And now doctors are one step closer to emulating the success of Brown’s surgery to help the estimated 34 million people worldwide who are HIV positive.
Experts hope that umbilical cord blood transplants could provide a similar solution to Brown’s in curing the virus.
Brown – often known as ‘The Berlin Patient’ because he formerly lived in that city – first tested positive for HIV in 1995.
In 2007, when he was still living in Germany, Mr Brown was undergoing extensive treatment for leukemia.
During the course of his treatment, doctors gave him a bone marrow stem cell transplant from a donor with a genetic mutation that made him immune from HIV.
The mutation, called delta 32, occurs in an estimated 1 per cent of people descended from Northern Europeans, with Swedes being the most likely candidates.
