The first person to be cured of HIV infection is now said to be terminally ill from the resurgence of cancer he was said to be cured of 12 years ago.
The patient in question, who goes by the name of Timothy Ray Brown, underwent a transplant from a donor with a natural resistance to the AIDS virus. Such kinds of transplants are very risky as the patients' immune system has to be destroyed with chemotherapy and radiation, and then the donor' cells are transplanted.
The doctors hoped that transplanting the donor' cells with a gene mutation that provides natural resistance to the AIDS virus, will develop a new immune system for the patient.
Following the procedure, for years, it was thought to have cured his HIV infection, and leukemia, which he was diagnosed with, in 2006.
Nicknamed the 'Berlin patient', he underwent the surgery at a hospital in Berlin. He was an American working as a translator in Berlin in the 1990s when he learned he had HIV.
However in an interview with The Associated Press, Brown said that is cancer returned last year and has spread.
Brown underwent his first t transplant in 2007 was only partly successful, and then got another transplant from the same donor in March 2008 and it seemed to work.
Unfortunately, now, he is again receiving hospice care for cancer in Palm Springs, California.
He, however, was cured of HIV after he repeatedly tested negative for the virus. Since then, he had appeared at several AIDS conferences where ground-breaking research about the AIDS virus is discussed.
"Timothy proved that HIV can be cured, but that's not what inspires me about him," Dr Steven Deeks, an AIDS specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, who worked with brown for further research had said to AP.
"I'm still glad that I had it," Brown said of his transplant.
"It opened up doors that weren't there before" and inspired scientists to work harder to find a cure, which many had begun to think was not possible," he added.
