First patient to beat AIDS dies HIV-free in the age of 54
by Georgia Avramidou

The cases of HIV patients who managed to defeat the virus are so few that we know them by name. Timothy Ray Brown, the infamous “Berlin patient”, died in September bringing HIV on the top of our attention once again.
Brown was mostly known as the “Berlin patient” who defeated HIV, having lived HIV-free for 13 years until eventually dying from leukemia. Even though technically the second “Berlin patient” to receive treatment against the virus in 2007, Brown became the person most commonly associated with this title as he was the first and only of the two Berlin patients to reveal his identity.
Last year a second HIV-cleared patient came to light, Adam Castillejo. The “London patient” received the same kind of stem cell transplantation as Brown and is only the second person to see a remission of the viral infection.
The principle of the treatment lies on a receptor found on some of our immune cells, namely CCR5. This receptor is used by HIV to enter and therefore infect the cells. Both Brown and Castillejo were diagnosed with blood cancer and were in need of bone marrow transplantation. This is where the CCR5 receptor came in use, with the medical team choosing to use blood cells from a donor with mutated CCR5 receptor. This mutation made the donor cells resistant to the virus, as the mutated receptor wouldn’t allow infection from the virus anymore.
Bone marrow transplantation required intense pre-treatment of the patients with chemotherapy or radiotherapy before the transplant. This approach, however, has been ameliorated for Castillejo whose pre-treatment was far less aggressive than Brown’s. Unfortunately, this method to tackle HIV is only effective for cancer patients. So far it has triumphant results since both patients didn’t have any HIV particles in their body without using any additional antiretroviral medication after transplantation. This finding though does not yet signify that the patients are cured.
The two successful examples of stem cell transplantation, Castillejo and Brown chose to reveal their identities to act as bearers of hope for all the people fighting against HIV. Even though far from ideal, this strategy is the only established approach to relieve patients from HIV so far. Only time can show if it is indeed effective while hopefully, a new, less invasive and more accessible method is being developed.