photo: Timothy Brown – Courtesy Fooya

BERLIN – In 2007, American Timothy Brown traveled to Germany to receive an experimental adult stem cell transplant and therapy to cure his leukemia. The then HIV-positive man received quite a surprise when the procedure ended up curing his HIV. His doctors officially say his HIV status is now officially negative.

In 2007, Brown received a blood transplant with new bone marrow from a man who has a gene mutation that confers natural resistance to HIV. The new bone marrow created new white blood cells that were able to fight the infection. In addition, Brown is also cured of leukemia.

“It’s an interesting proof-of-concept that with pretty extraordinary measures a patient could be cured of HIV,” but it is far too risky to become standard therapy even if matched donors could be found, said Dr. Michael Saag of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “We can’t really apply this particular approach to healthy individuals because the risk is just too high.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the procedure is too expensive and risky to be practical as a cure, but that it might give more clues to using gene therapy or other methods to achieve the same result. Globally, HIV has infected about 33 million people and has killed 25 million people since the disease was first discovered in the early ’80s.

Currently more than $30 billion is spent on HIV/AIDS research, treatment and management, a figure which many experts expect to double in the next 10 years.

In an earlier breakthrough this year, researchers had discovered antibodies that can protect against AIDS and said they may be able to use them to design a vaccine.