Timothy Brown Declared Cured

A man who 17 years ago was diagnosed with a disease that attacks the human immune sistm (AIDS) declared cured. Timothy Brown (46) was declared healthy and being the only person in the world today who survived a deadly disease, which until now it has no cure.

Brown declared cured after undergoing a stem cell transplant therapy blood from a donor with a specific genetic mutation. Therapy was performed to treat another disease, leukemia, he suffered and was diagnosed a year before he was first known to have AIDS.

Brown's condition, which is often called "Patients of Berlin" was, of course, the spark of hope for the world's larger world of medicine that AIDS was indeed curable. "I feel healthy, I have never suffered a serious illness, just the common cold like everyone else," he told ABC News, Friday (06/08/2012).

Brown was very lucky because the received blood stem cells, derived from a donor with a specific genetic mutation. Specific mutations that make HIV resistant to the virus. Before Brown perform transplants in 2007, doctors have tested nearly 70 donors for this genetic mutation to finally find a suitable donor. Genetic mutations that only occurred in less than 1 percent of the white race. The possibility of the same thing happens in other races known to much smaller.

Medical director of a cord blood bank, StemCyte, Dr. Lawrence Petz, said although Brown has been cured thanks to the transplant, the process itself is very complicated because of the use of stem cells derived from adult donors. According to Petz, cord blood transplant method presumably much easier to find a suitable donor.

However, so in practice it requires a very complicated process. So far Petz and colleagues have done tests on 17 000 cord blood samples, and found only 102 samples with HIV-resistant genetic mutation.

Team doctors then perform cord blood transplants in HIV-infected patients a few weeks ago, and will do the same thing on a patient in Madrid, Spain, later this year. However, it can take many months before it can be known whether the transplant methods can have a positive impact on HIV patients.