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HIV ‘Cured’ in Second Patient, Over a Decade After the First, Scientists Say

The “London patient” stopped taking his HIV meds in 2017 and has since been virus-free.

Scientists have reportedly managed to cure a second patient of HIV after more than a decade spent trying to duplicate the first cure in 2007. Scientists told The New York Times that the anonymous man, dubbed the “London patient,” has been off his HIV medication since September 2017 and has remained virus-free. The patient reportedly had Hodgkin’s lymphoma and received a bone-marrow transplant with a CCR5 protein mutation—which produces immune cells that HIV cannot latch onto. Since treatment, the London patient has passed repeated analyses of his blood with no detection of the virus. “I feel a sense of responsibility to help the doctors understand how it happened so they can develop the science,” the London patient told the Times, adding that learning he was cancer-free and HIV free was “surreal” and “overwhelming.” “I never thought that there would be a cure during my lifetime,” he said. Scientists plan to publish a report on the London patient Tuesday in the science journal Nature, and discuss their findings at a Seattle conference. The first patient to be cured, Timothy Ray Brown, was cured of HIV and leukemia after he received two bone-marrow transplants with the CCR5 mutation 12 years ago.