The Berlin Patient, First Man Cured of HIV, Is Now Terminally Ill With Cancer
Timothy Ray Brown, known as the ‘Berlin Patient’ and the only person to have been cured of AIDS, holds a press conference to announce the launch of the Timothy Ray Brown Foundation at the Westin City Center hotel on July 24, 2012, in Washington, DC.
Timothy Ray Brown is the first-ever HIV patient known to have been cured of the disease. But now, reports say that he is terminally ill from returning cancer, which stimulated his historic treatment from more than a decade ago.
Brown, called "the Berlin patient," due to his residence at that time, underwent a transplant from a donor who reportedly had a "rare, natural resistance to AIDS virus."
For several years, he was believed to have treated both his leukemia and HIV infection, and he still doesn't present any sign of HIV.
However, in his recent interview with a prestigious news outfit, Brown said his cancer recurred last year, and it has widely spread. Currently, "the Berlin patient" is receiving hospice care in Palm Springs, California, where he presently lives.
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A Transplant He's Still Glad to Have Gotten
Commenting on his transplant, Brown shared he's till glad "that I had it." Meanwhile, that transplant opened doors that were not there before.
The 54-year-old added that it inspired researchers to work harder, searching for a cure, which many people had started to think was impossible.
AIDS specialist Dr. Steven Deeks from the University of California, San Francisco, said Brown proved that HIV is curable. However, that was not what inspires him about the patient he has worked with to further study toward a treatment.
Deeks shared, they took pieces of Brown's gut and added, "We took pieces of his lymph node." And each time their patient was asked to do something, the doctor said, he would "show up with amazing grace."
An American who worked as a translator in Berlin, Brown learned he had HIV in the 1990s. Then in 2006, following a diagnosis, he found out he had leukemia.
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The Marrow Transplant
University of Berlin's blood cancer expert Dr. Gero Huetter believed a marrow transplant was the best chance for Brown to beat leukemia.
He wondered, though, if he could also cure the patient's other life-threatening illness by using a donor who had a gene mutation that provided natural resistance to the AIDS infection.
The expert also said donors like these are relatively rare, not to mention the high risk of transplants. Doctors need to destroy the diseased immune system of the patient through radiation and chemotherapy and then transplant the donor cells with the hope of developing into a new immune system for the recipient.
In 2007, Brown had his first transplant, and according to a report, it was only partially successful. His HIV may have been cured but not his leukemia.
In 2008, "the Berlin patient" went through a second transplant from the same donor, which seemed effective.
From that second transplant, Brown has always tested negative for HIV. He often appeared at AID-related conferences where treatment research was the topic of discussion. Brown's partner, Tim Hoeffgen, said he had been an "ambassador of hope."
Meanwhile, Mark King, a man from Baltimore who's writing a blog for HIV patients, said earlier this week that he spoke with Brown and added that he is grateful for Brown's contributions to AIDS research.
"It is unfathomable," King said of Brown, "What value he has been to the world as a subject of science." And yet, the blog writer added, the man is also a human being who he described as a "kind, humble guy" who definitely "never asked for the spotlight."
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Sep 26, 2020 07:00 AM EDT
