New study explains why only one person has been cured of HIV

To this date, only one person is thought to have been cured of HIV – the “Berlin patient” Timothy Ray Brown. But no one is exactly sure which aspect of Brown’s treatment may have cured him. Now a new experiment on monkeys provides more evidence that a rare genetic mutation in the person who donated bone marrow to Brown may have had a central role in his cure. The experiment was conducted by by Dr. Guido Silvestri, a pathologist at Emory University in Atlanta.

The use of the CCR5 mutant donor and/or the presence of graft versus host disease played a significant role.

Dr. Guido Silvestri, a pathologist at Emory University

Brown’s HIV was eradicated in 2007 after he underwent a treatment in Germany for his leukemia, where he first underwent radiation and then received a bone-marrow transplant from a healthy donor to generate new blood cells. After the treatment, not only was Brown’s leukemia in remission, his HIV levels also plummeted to undetectable levels, and they have remained so ever since, even though he has not been taking the antiretroviral (ART) drugs typically used to keep HIV levels low in patients.

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