Patient cured of Leukemia and HIV!

Over winter break, my father told me a very interesting story he had heard on the radio concerning an individual in Germany who was "cured" of HIV and Leukemia. I was a little skeptical at first, but still very interested, so I went home and researched more about this person. His name is Timothy Ray Brown. A 48 year old American who underwent a type of stem cell transplant, more specifically bone marrow transplant in 2007 in Berlin. Mr. Brown was about to undergo a form of stem cell therapy, but his doctors decided to go with a transplant in order to try get rid of the HIV. A Stem cell transplant is a last ditch effort to cure cancer's such as leukemia due to the fact that they are very dangerous. The donor and patient need to have very...
similar blood and immune systems in order for the transplant to work or else the patient will die. In other words the chances for success are very, very rare. Luckily for Mr. Brown, the donor had a mutation on CCR5 , a receptor gene, in white blood cells, that prevent the AIDS virus from entering and infecting the human cell. The transplant was successful and Mr. Brown has seen no trace of either the HIV virus or the leukemia since he underwent surgery four years ago. Doctors claim that, "Brown's cell counts remain in the range of people without HIV," (The Gazette). Doctors say this treatment cannot be used on everyone since patients have to undergo other treatments like chemotherapy and radiation, but also because of the rarity of its success. Even though this might not be a solution for everyone, doctors will look more into it to try to figure out what exactly happened. They will have to wait for Mr. Brown to pass away in order to perform an autopsy so they can research more. Hopefully they can find a cure which could apply to the rest of the individuals suffering from leukemia and HIV.


I find it incredible how doctors took the risk to undergo a stem cell transplant and were able to achieve a positive outcome. This doesn't happen very often with new treatments and I am happy for Mr. Brown and medicine in general. From the slim knowledge I have of cancer biology (from reading Chapter 1 and 2 in our text) I find it amazing how the hematopoietic cancer (leukemia) was able to just stay in the blood and not metastasize to other parts of the body creating new tumors from the primary, malignant tumor either found in the blood or bone marrow (depending on the type of leukemia Mr. Brown was diagnosed with). On top of that the HIV that Mr. Brown had also went away due to the mutation in the donators bone marrow. It just seems amazing how everything worked, the transplant, the similarity in blood and bone marrow of the two individuals, etc. I agree with some doctors that we cannot call it a cure yet (that is why the word cure is in quotations in my first paragraph), since the procedure was performed a short time ago and the cancer can come back and an outbreak might happen, but I would rather stay positive and believe Mr. Brown will stay healthy. Still, this event is nothing short from a medicinal miracle due to all it's improbabilities. Timothy Ray Brown was granted a new life!

Recommended Articles: Newser, The Gazette and Reuters

Dr. Gero Hütter isn't an AIDS specialist, but he 'functionally cured' a patient, who shows no sign of the disease.

From:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122602394113507555.html