First person to be cured of HIV, dies of cancer

Timothy Ray Brown, the first person to be cured of HIV, has died at age 54.

He died Tuesday in his Palm Springs, Calif., home after a five-month battle with leukemia, his partner Tim Hoeffgen confirmed in a social media post.

“It is with great sadness that I announce that Timothy passed away at 3:10 pm this afternoon surrounded by myself and friends,” Hoeffgen wrote.

Brown (inset) became known as “the Berlin patient” over a decade ago after a German doctor announced the first case of a patient who had been cleared of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

The Seattle-born HIV/AIDS activist was working as a translator in Berlin, where he lived from 1993 until 2010, when he was diagnosed with HIV in 1995. He was diagnosed with leukemia in 2007.

Brown received bone-marrow transplants, in 2007 and 2008, which put his cancer in remission, and seemed to completely eliminate HIV from his body — the first known case in the world.

“Timothy symbolized that it is possible, under special circumstances,” to rid a patient of HIV — something that many scientists had doubted could be done, Dr. Gero Huetter, the Berlin physician who led Brown’s historic treatment, told The Associated Press.

It was only when he returned to the U.S., in 2010, that he went public about his status as the “Berlin patient,” appearing on the cover of Poz magazine.

“Tim committed his life’s work to telling his story about his HIV cure and became an ambassador of hope,” Hoeffgen wrote. “Tim also gave numerous blood and tissue samples to researchers after his cure.”

Mark S. King, a prominent HIV/AIDS activist and award-winning journalist, celebrated the “heroism” shown by Brown, noting “he could have remained completely anonymous when he was identified only as ‘the Berlin patient.’ ”

However, “by choosing to strip himself of his privacy, Timothy became the subject of intense interest around the world,” King wrote. “His disclosure put a face on the promise of an HIV cure and elevated him to hero status in the HIV community,” he added.