Timothy Ray Brown, first patient cured of HIV, dies
Timothy Ray Brown, the first person to be cured of HIV, through an experimental bone marrow transplant that offered hope though not a realistic treatment for most people with the virus, died Tuesday at his home in Palm Springs, California. He was 54.
His partner, Tim Hoeffgen, said the cause was unrelated recurring leukemia. Brown had remained free of HIV, the virus that can lead to AIDS.
“Timothy would like to be remembered as a man who gave hope to people around the world that a cure for HIV is possible,” Hoeffgen said in an email.
Brown, a Seattle native, was a university student in Berlin when he tested positive for the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, in 1995. Following a subsequent diagnosis of leukemia, he underwent the transplant of bone marrow stem cells on Feb. 6, 2007, a highrisk procedure that was declared a success. He declared Feb. 6 his new “birth date.”
The breakthrough, reported at the 2008 International AIDS Conference, made headlines around the world as the “AIDS cure.”
But it also met with some skepticism in the scientific community. Some AIDS researchers sought to test Brown’s blood samples for themselves. Some questioned whether, if indeed he was free of HIV, the virus could still recur. Experts noted as well that bone marrow transplants were risky, expensive and unlikely to be available for wide use.
Brown was originally known only pseudonymously, as the “Berlin Patient.” But three years later, he became a reluctant public figure when he decided to reveal his identity.
“At some point, I decided I didn’t want to be the only person in the world cured of HIV,” Brown told the website ContagionLive last year. “I wanted there to be more. And the way to do that was to show the world who I am and be an advocate for HIV.”
He added, “My story is important only because it proves that HIV can be cured, and if something has happened once in medical science, it can happen again.”
Timothy Ray Brown was born in Seattle on March 11, 1966, and, as an only child, was raised by his mother, Sharon Brown, who worked in the King County sheriff’s department, in Seattle and nearby Edmonds, Washington. (No information was available on his father.)
Openly gay since high school and a member of Act Up, the AIDS activist group, he moved to Barcelona, Spain, in 1991, in his mid-20s, and then to Berlin, where he studied German.
In 1995, when powerful new AIDS cocktails and protease inhibitors were just being introduced, Brown was advised by a former boyfriend, who had tested HIV-positive, to have himself tested. The results came back positive.
“The friend who told me I should get tested said, ‘Do you realize you only have about two more years to live?’” Brown recalled in an interview with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle in 2015. “But I still went on with my life. I started university in Berlin and acted like everything was going to be OK.”
New antiretroviral drug therapy, covered by his German health insurance, prolonged his life, and he worked as a translator. But in 2006, after returning to Berlin from a wedding in New York, he could barely make his daily 10-mile bicycle ride to work.
At 40, he received a second life-threatening diagnosis: acute myeloid leukemia. He was referred to Dr. Gero Hütter, an oncologist who had never treated a patient with HIV; he suggested the radical, high-risk stem cell experiment.
First, doctors had to find a compatible donor with a rare gene mutation that would provide a natural resistance to HIV. A disproportionate number of northern Europeans, about 1%, lack a protein on the surface of their white blood cells that the virus uses as an entry point.
Next, to accommodate the donor’s immune cells, they had to wipe out Brown’s own immune system by bombarding him with chemotherapy and radiation. Next came the transplant procedure itself. On that same February day, Brown stopped taking his antiretroviral medication. Three months later, after a grueling recovery in which he almost died, he was HIVfree.