A Patient with HIV Has Gone Into Remission—Only the Second Case in Recorded Medical History

An HIV patient in London remains free of the virus 18 months after he stopped taking antiretroviral drugs. This is the second case of long-term remission since Timothy Ray Brown, also known as “The Berlin Patient” (because his case originated in Berlin), who has effectively been cured of HIV for a decade. Successive treatments to try and replicate Brown’s success have failed, until now.

The new patient, described in a Nature article published Tuesday, received a bone marrow transplant in 2016 as a treatment for Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system. The procedure replaced his white blood cells with those from a donor with a gene mutation that prevents the HIV virus from invading T-cells—specifically CD4-positive T-cells—which destroy infection and keep the immune system healthy.

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