An anonymous stem cell donor cured Timothy Ray Brown of both his leukemia and his HIV. For years, experts wondered whether it was a cure or just a temporary remission.
It’s been 11 years. Brown is still HIV and cancer-free.
Brown, 53, is now frequently asked to speak around the world to scientists, people with HIV and everyone else curious about his experience. Once referred to only as the “Berlin Patient,” Brown’s identity is no longer a mystery and at events in Vancouver this week, he is the inspiring guest speaker.
Before talking to scientists affiliated with the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, Brown said in an interview that he keeps pushing researchers and physicians to think outside the box. His physician did in 2007 when Brown was an American living in Berlin and diagnosed with acute myeloma leukemia. To complicate matters, he had HIV.
Fortuitously, he was referred to a blood specialist named Gero Hütter who would become Brown’s “saviour” by trying a novel approach after initial treatment with chemotherapy failed. Hütter searched for a registered donor who was both a tissue match for Brown and a double carrier (inherited from both parents) of a gene called the CCR5-delta 32 mutation. Those with the mutation are resistant to HIV, a discovery made in the mid-1990s at the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
Only one per cent of Northern Europeans have such a mutated gene, but Hütter found a donor in the registry without too much difficulty.
Brown, who was born in Seattle but now lives in Palm Springs, has no idea who the donor is except he was a German going to university in New York City who flew to Germany when called on to donate his stem cells.