Events
Many publications around the world have already reported on the case of a person who recovered from AIDS. However, this story has a lot of caveats.
Timothy Ray Brown, better known as the “Berlin Patient,” was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia back in 2007. The standard treatment for this disease is that doctors use chemotherapy to kill infected blood cells and then replace them with healthy ones, transplanting the bone marrow of a healthy person.
But in Brown's case, doctors allowed themselves a little bit of “creativity”. For a bone marrow transplant, they chose a donor who had a rare genetic mutation — resistance to HIV infection. This is typical for very few people in the world.
HIV controllers are people with naturally strong immune systems. The virus affects such people, but it does not progress and, ultimately, the person does not become ill. The man who donated his bone marrow to Ray Brown was just such an HIV controller. Thanks to the transplant, this feature was also passed on to Brown.
Another feature that actually caused so much hype about the story of the “Berlin Patient” is that mutated cells in Brown's body are potentially able to find and destroy even possible “hidden caches” of the virus.
But according to other researchers, this one successful case does not imply that this method can be a safe method for treating AIDS patients. Thus, they believe that this is not so much a “treatment” as an interesting study.
Moreover, this procedure is very expensive. And most AIDS patients are poor Africans who live far from the medicine available to Brown in Europe.
And most importantly, Timothy Ray Brown was cured of AIDS, but no cure for AIDS was found.