The fact that Timothy Brown is a reasonably healthy 46-year-old is no small thing. Only a few years ago, he had AIDS.
“I feel good,” Brown told ABC News. “I haven’t had any major illnesses, just occasional colds like normal people.”
Brown is the only person in the world to be cured of AIDS, the result of a transplant of blood stem cells he received to treat leukemia.
“My case is the proof in concept that HIV can be cured,” he said.
Brown got lucky. The blood stem cells he received came from a donor with a special genetic mutation that made him resistant to HIV. The genetic mutation occurs in less than 1 percent of Caucasians, and far less frequently in people of other races. Before Brown got his transplant in 2007, doctors tested nearly 70 donors for this genetic mutation before they found one who was a match.
But doctors hope that a similar solution could help other people with HIV: umbilical cord blood transplants.
Dr. Lawrence Petz, medical director of StemCyte, an umbilical cord blood bank, said although Brown was cured by his transplant, the process was complicated because the blood stem cells came from an adult donor.
“When you do that you have to have a very close match between donor and recipient,” Petz said. “With umbilical cord blood, we don’t need such a close match. It’s far easier to find donor matches.”
ABC NewsAnd there are still people out there who condemn stem cell research. And of course they're probably the same ones who believe AIDS is God's punishment for gay people.