Popularly known as the Berlin patient, he is the only person said to have been "cured" of HIV/AIDS.
Originally from Seattle, Washington, a translator of German, of medium height and very skinny, with thinning brown hair.
Timothy found out he had HIV in 1995. He had HIV for 12 years before he became the first person in the world to be cured of the infection following a stem cell transplant in 2007.
Timothy Ray Brown, was first described in 2008 following a poster presented at the 2008 annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) in Boston by Dr. Gero Hütter, Timothy's physician.
TIMOTHY'S ORDEAL AND BREAKTHROUGH
Timothy discovered he had HIV after getting to know that his former partner was infected with HIV. After going for the test, he also turned up positive.
By this time, there wasn't yet antiretroviral therapy, so Timothy was thought to have probably only two years to live. But this wrong, as the lifesaving anti-retrovirals were made soon after.
Timothy spent the next ten years living in Berlin, pursuing his career and enjoying the city by night. He was gregarious, a fast talker; when he went out, he'd always wind up the center of a group.
In 2006, Timothy was living in Berlin with his boyfriend, a man named Michael from the former East Germany. That year, on a trip to New York for a wedding, he began to feel miserable. He thought it to be jet lag, but it didn't go away.
Back in Berlin, his bike ride to work took so long that he got sacked by his boss for lateness. Michael called his doctor, who saw Brown the next day. The results came back. As if HIV was not enough, a new, unrelated disease was now threatening his life: leukaemia.
Brown was referred to Charité Medical University, where he was treated by Gero Hütter, a 37-year-old specialist in blood cancers.
After chemotherapy, the leukaemia came back. Brown's last chance was a stem-cell transplant from a bone-marrow donor.
Hütter had an idea. He knew little about HIV, but he remembered that people with a certain natural genetic mutation are very resistant to the virus. The mutation, called delta 32, disables CCR5, a receptor on the surface of immune-system cells that, in the vast majority of cases, is HIV's path inside. People with copies from both parents are almost completely protected from getting HIV, and they are relatively common in northern Europe; among Germans, the rate is about one in a hundred.
Hütter resolved to see if he could use a stem-cell donor with the delta-32 mutation to cure not just Brown's leukemia but also his HIV.
Hütter found 232 donors worldwide who were matches for Brown. If probabilities held, two would have double delta 32. Hütter persuaded the people at the registry to test the donors for the mutation; his laboratory paid, at a cost of about $40 per sample. They worked through the list, and donor 61 was a hit.
His colleagues and the chief of his unit were dubious. "The main problem was that I was just a normal physician. I had no leading position. It was not always easy to get what we needed", Hütter recalls.
Brown himself was not pushing the idea. "At that point, I wasn't that concerned about HIV, because I could keep taking medication", he says.
Before Hütter asked the donor registry to begin testing, he had searched the literature and contacted AIDS experts. It dawned on him that no one had ever done this before. "My first thought was, I'm wrong. There must be something I was missing". In a sense, that was true. Gero Hütter did not know what most AIDS researchers and clinicians had taken as accepted wisdom: A cure was impossible.
Dr. Gero Hütter, however, arranged for him to receive the hematopoietic stem cell transplant from a donor with the"delta 32" mutation on the CCR5 receptor.
THE UNDERLYING PRINCIPLE. . .
The "delta 32" mutation on the CCR5 receptor is a very rare mutation. This mutation results in a mutated CCR5 protein.
The majority of HIV cannot enter a human cell without a functional CCR5 gene.
Those individuals who are homozygous for the CCR5 mutation are resistant to HIV and rarely progress to AIDS.
Timothy received two stem cell transplants from one donor homozygous for the delta32 mutation: one in 2007 and one in 2008. These transplant not only cured his cancer, but had cleared of his HIV too.
Timothy stopped taking his antretroviral medication on the day of his first transplant. Three months after the first stem cell transplant, levels of HIV rapidly plummeted to undetectable levels while his CD4 T cell count increased.
In addition, after his treatment, Timothy Ray Brown has been tested everywhere possible. Timothy's blood has been tested by many, many agencies. Blood and tissue samples from areas of the body where HIV is known to hide were tested. The results were published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Today, Timothy still remains off antiretroviral therapy and is considered cured.
Today leading HIV cure scientists agree that Timothy has what is called a sterilizing cure as opposed to a functional cure.
"BUT WHY'S THAT PROCEDURE NOT USED TO CURE OTHER PEOPLE?"
Brown's case is rare. The procedure is extremely dangerous because a patient's immune system has to be wiped out in order to accept the bone marrow transplant.
The treatment Timothy received nearly killed him. Twice.
Timothy endured chemotherapy, the stem cell transplant, and got pneumonia and sepsis infections in the process. His recovery from the stem cell transplant was exhausting and life-threatening.
Using a bone marrow transplants to treat HIV is not a feasible treatment for most patients; only 1% of Caucasians -- mostly Northern Europeans -- and no African-Americans or Asians have this particular mutation, researchers say.
The physician responsible for Timothy's cure, Dr. Gero Huetter, eventually admitted he had given his patient only a 5 percent chance of survival.
Now, everywhere in the world, there is a little bit of Timothy in vials all laboratories around the globe, millions of drops of Timothy's blood, DNA and tissue samples are being studied.
Timothy had this to say, "I love to give researchers and scientists a hard time about how they know me intimately. If only they knew how many pokes, prodding, surgeries and pain I have endured, perhaps they would at least buy me dinner. But it's all worth it in the spirit of finding a cure for AIDS.
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