HIV discoverer admits there is hope of cure

By Kim Eun-ji

Timothy Brown, 45, also known as the “Berlin patient,” may be a hero to many AIDS patients ­ he too once had HIV.

Brown tested HIV-positive in 1995 and was diagnosed with leukemia in 2006, according to his website. To treat the leukemia, he received a stem cell transplant from a donor who had a CCR5 mutation, which eradicated HIV in Brown’s system.

The protein initially lets the HIV virus enter and affect cells, but once mutated, they no longer register the HIV virus, experts said.

“There is hope … but don’t ask me for a date because we do not know,” said Dr. Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, a French 2008 Nobel Prize winner who discovered HIV in 1983.

Brown does not have any sign of the HIV virus even without treatment for the past five years, said Dr. Steven Deeks at the University of California, San Francisco.

“In a strict scientific sense, we can say that Brown is fully cured,” Deeks said.

Stem cell transplants, however, have yet to be perfected as immune rejection response may attack the transplanted cells or organs, according to experts.