First Ever Fully cured HIV-AIDS Patient - Timothy Ray Brown

Timothy Ray Brown, a resident of San Francisco Bay Area, is possibly the first ever person to be fully cured of the incurable HIV-AIDS disease, according to scientific journal Blood. Timothy Ray Brown was tested positive for HIV around 15 years ago when he was around the age of 30. He later found out that he was also diagnosed with Leukemia. When he was still in Germany in 2007, doctors used bone marrow stem cell transplant as a method of curing his Leukemia and neither HIV nor Leukemia has been traced on him since 2008.

"I quit taking my HIV medication the day that I got the transplant and haven’t had to take any since," said Brown, who is known as 'The Berlin Patient' in medical circles.

Brown received the stem cells from a person who is apparently immune to HIV, a character that only about 1 percent of Caucasians have. Dr. Jay Levi, a leading researcher in the field of HIV-AIDS at University ofCalifornia-San Franciso (UCSF), has called this a "functional cure."

"If you're able to take the white cells from someone and manipulate them so they're no longer infected, or infectable, no longer infectable by HIV, and those white cells become the whole immune system of that individual, you've got essentially a functional cure," said Levy.

Although the researchers this a "productive area to study," they warned people not to get too excited just yet, because it is not something that can be generalized.

"You don't want to go out and get a bone marrow transplant because transplants themselves carry a real risk of mortality," said Dr. Paul Volberding, another researcher at UCSF.

Volberding added, "one element of his treatment, and we don’t know which, apparently allowed the virus to be purged from his body."

Watch Timothy Brown discuss the miracle in the video below:

Source: IBTimes & CBS News