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The “Düsseldorf patient”: A third person may also be in HIV remission

Author: Matt Davis / Source: Big Think

  • Timothy Brown became the first person to be cured of HIV in 2007.
  • Recently, it’s been reported that a patient known as “the London patient” has also lost any trace of the HIV virus in their system.
  • Now, a third patient appears to be in HIV remission known as “the Düsseldorf patient.

Recently, the New York Times reported that for the first time in over a decade, a person with HIV has been cured of the deadly virus. Now, it’s come to light that another patient—the third in history—has been cured of HIV as well.

We first learned that curing HIV was possible in 2007, when a patient known initially as “the Berlin patient,” was diagnosed with both leukemia and HIV. The patient, whose name is Timothy Ray Brown, received a bone marrow transplant to treat his leukemia; after this treatment, Brown’s doctors discovered that his HIV had been cured as well.

Leukemia is a cancer of the bone marrow, which is why Brown needed a transplant. Bone marrow contains stem cells that eventually differentiate into the three basic types of blood cells: red blood cells, platelets, and—critical to the immune system—white blood cells. The fact that Brown had both leukemia and HIV isn’t pure happenstance; HIV, which infects white blood cells and eventually causes AIDS, has been linked to the development of blood cancers such as leukemia and lymphoma.

Brown was treated with two bone marrow transplants, aggressive chemotherapy, and total body irradiation, a harsh treatment that landed him in a medically induced coma and nearly killed him. But after surviving his treatment, Brown found that both his leukemia and HIV were gone.

Dr. Steven Deeks, who treated Brown, told the New York Times, “He was really beaten up by the whole procedure. […] 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.”

Despite repeated attempts at reproducing the treatment, Brown had been the sole person to be cured of HIV until recently. Twelve years later, “the London patient” was cured of HIV as a result of a similar procedure. And now there’s news of a third, “the Düsseldorf patient,” who also appears to have been cured of HIV.

Finding the right cure

A scanning electron microscope image of HIV. The virus, colored in green, can be seen budding from the surface of a lymphocyte. Image source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Part of the challenge of recreating Brown’s success was identifying which factor of…

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