“Berlin patient”: Timothy Ray Brown - - A Ray of Hope For HIV/AIDS Patients

Doctors announce that one HIV patient is free from infection due to a complex treatment that included stem cell transplantation resistant to the virus.

The American Timothy Ray Brown, who lives in Germany, is being called the “Berlin patient” after spending three years free of the virus that causes AIDS in his body.

His case is the result of an unusual series of coincidences that led him to be subjected to various procedures. In 2007, Brown, who was HIV positive, was diagnosed with leukemia and received by the team of Dr Gero Hütter, Medical University of Berlin, a bone marrow transplant.

The donated material, however, had one peculiarity: it came from an individual who had a natural resistance to HIV. Genetically, the donor did not have in their cells a receptor called CCR5. It turns out that the most common strain of HIV uses CCR5 as just the “station” to turn on and attack the CD4 white blood cells, a type of cell in the immune system. Like all viruses, HIV cannot replicate itself: it uses the genetic material of an individual (in this case, white blood cell) to replicate. So people with this mutation are virtually safe from infection. Despite being the port of entry, CCR5 is not the only way: over time during infection, there are other viruses that can use other receptors such as CXCR4.

The Brown case was first presented in 2008 in Boston at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections. In February 2009, the results were published in the New England Journal of Medicine.