News is just breaking that a man has been ‘cured’ of AIDS after getting a bone marrow transplant from donor with ‘HIV immune’ gene… Woohoo!

The Daily Mail Reports:

Timothy Ray Brown, 45, claims to be the first person in history to be completely cured of AIDs.

Mr Brown, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, told that region’s CBS 5: ‘I’m cured of HIV. I had HIV but I don’t anymore’.

Last December, Mr Brown – often known as ‘The Berlin Patient’ because he formerly lived in that city – had his case published in the peer-reviewed journal ‘Blood’.
The researchers wrote that tests ‘strongly suggest that cure of HIV infection has been achieved’.

Although experts remain cautiously optimistic about the larger consequences of Mr Brown’s story, CBS 5 reported that some doctors not associated with the study call it a ‘functional cure’.

Mr Brown said he first tested positive for HIV in 1995.
In 2007, when he was living in Germany, Mr Brown was undergoing extensive treatment for leukaemia in Berlin.

During the course of his treatment, his doctors gave him a bone marrow stem cell transplant from a donor thought to be immune from HIV.

The invasive procedure was not without risk, as some recipients can come down with graft-versus-host disease, which causes a number of serious complications.
But in this week’s sit-down interview, Mr Brown told CBS 5: ‘I quit taking my HIV medication the day that I got the transplant and haven’t had to take any since’.

Scientists have been studying immunity to HIV since the disease was discovered 30 years ago, as it soon became apparent that a small percentage of people seemed to be naturally resistant.

Researchers eventually zoomed in on a gene called CCR5. That gene codes for a protein that acts as a ‘receptor’ outside white blood cells – essentially a ‘lock’.

If that receptor isn’t present, it seems that the HIV virus cannot break into the blood cell. That means it cannot begin the infection that eventually leads to AIDS.

Scientists believe those who have one copy of the CCR5 gene enjoy some resistance against HIV, but not total immunity. That seems to be the case in about 10 to 15 per cent of those descended from Northern Europeans.

Read the rest of the article here.