First person believed to be cured of AIDS gives hope to researchers - Toronto Star

Timothy Ray Brown

T.J. Kirkpatrick/GETTY IMAGES Timothy Ray Brown, known as the "Berlin Patient" and the only person to have been cured of AIDS, holds a press conference to announce the launch of the Timothy Ray Brown Foundation at the Westin City Center hotel on July 24 in Washington, D.C.

WASHINGTONâ€"An influential group of scientists gathered this week at the International AIDS Conference in Washington is committing to a goal that just five years ago would have seemed ludicrous: to cure HIV.

While acknowledging substantial challenges, they argue that the effort is necessary because the epidemic cannot be contained through treatment and prevention alone. And recent medical and scientific advances â€" including the case of the first man definitively cured of the human immunodeficiency virus â€" offer proof that it’s possible.

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The first person believed to have been cured of AIDS, Timothy Ray Brown, addressed the media in the U.S. for the first time on Tuesday and said that reports he still has the HIV virus are false.

Brown, also known as the “Berlin patient,” says doctors have told him he’s “cured of AIDS and will remain cured.”

Brown was an HIV-positive American who was living in Germany when he developed leukemia. After failing to respond to first-line cancer treatments, he chose to have a bone-marrow transplant in 2007. As his doctors searched for a suitable donor, they looked for one with a rare genetic mutation that disables a receptor known as CCR5, which HIV needs to gain entry into immune cells. Brown had two transplants that not only put his leukemia into remission but replaced his HIV-susceptible immune system with one that could ward off the disease.

Doctors declared him “cured” soon after.

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Researchers in California recently found traces of HIV in his tissues. But Brown says any remnants of the virus still in his body are dead and can’t replicate.

He appeared frail but energetic Tuesday, and announced the formation of a new AIDS foundation in his name.

Paula Cannon, a molecular biologist at USC’s Keck School of Medicine, said that until Brown came along, a scientist who proposed HIV cure research “would be laughed out of the room.”

“There’s nothing like success to galvanize the research,” she said. “People are daring to hope again that with a lot of hard work and ingenuity, scientists can deliver.”

Scientists have developed more than 20 antiretroviral therapies that can keep HIV in check, but the drugs have problems. Treatment is toxic and expensive, and only about half of the world’s 34 million people living with HIV can get them. Patients must take the drugs daily for the rest of their lives to keep the virus at bay.

“It’s just practically difficult to treat people all their life with therapy, even if it’s very simple therapy,” said Dr. David Margolis, director of the Program in Translational Clinical Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Bone marrow transplants like the one Brown received aren’t suitable for widespread use: Brown’s procedure ends in death 20 per cent of the time, and finding an appropriate donor would be a long shot in most cases. So scientists are working on alternatives.

Spearheading the audacious challenge is the International AIDS Society, which developed a research agenda in collaboration with more than 40 scientists led by French virologist Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, who won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 2008 for her role in the discovery of HIV.

There are two general approaches. One, an elimination cure, would rid the body of all HIV-infected cells. The other, a functional cure, would engineer a patient’s own immune system to resist HIV, even if the virus remains present in the body.

It won’t come cheap. Writing last week in Nature, Barre-Sinoussi and her colleague Dr. Steven Deeks estimated that governments and foundations invested about $75 million in HIV cure research in 2011, but said the effort would require hundreds of millions of dollars in annual funding until a cure is found.

Dr. Jay Levy, who codiscovered the AIDS virus in 1983, acknowledged that even if a cure were discovered, it could take years to become practical in low- and middle-income countries, where 97 per cent of the people with HIV live. But right now, he said, finding a cure is like “the four-minute mile â€" what we need to do is just show it’s possible.”

After that, he added, “there’s enough creativity out there to find a way of having it applied in all parts of the world.”

With files from Associated Press