The Only Cases of HIV Cure or Remission

A micrograph of HIV particles replicating
A T cell (red) that's been infected with HIV produces many copies of the virus (blue), as shown in this colorized transmission electron micrograph. HIV cure research continues to seek out ways to end this process once and for all. NIAID

Given how often the phrases “HIV cure” or “cure for HIV” appear in news reports and across social media platforms, you might start to think that we actually have one.

But roughly 40 years after we first realized that HIV was infecting and killing people, we still don’t have a safe, effective, widely available means by which to completely eliminate HIV from a person’s body.

What we do have, however, is an extraordinarily small number of people—just five of the roughly 84 million people estimated to have become HIV positive since the start of the global HIV epidemic—who do indeed appear to be completely HIV-free, and have no sign of the virus living within them.

Let’s take a quick look at each of these cases of HIV cure so we can better understand why they’re so rare.


Timothy Ray Brown in a leather vest
Timothy Ray Brown in a photo posted to his Facebook page in January 2019. From Timothy Ray Brown's Facebook page; reposted with permission

Timothy Ray Brown, the "Berlin Patient"

In the beginning, there was Timothy Ray Brown. An American living in Berlin, Brown was diagnosed with HIV in 1995—and with advanced leukemia in 2006. His prognosis had become grim.

A German oncologist, Gero Hütter, M.D., decided to try the medical equivalent of a Hail Mary pass: A never-before-attempted stem cell transplant in which the donor had a rare mutation (known as homozygous CCR5-delta 32) making him essentially immune to most forms of HIV.

The procedure was extremely risky—and stunningly successful. Though he stopped taking antiretroviral treatment for HIV shortly after his transplant and never resumed, Brown remained HIV-free, with no signs of active, replicating, or dormant virus through years of extensive testing.

Unfortunately, the same could not be said of Brown’s leukemia; after many years in remission, it returned, and claimed his life in 2020.


Adam Castillejo With Rowena Johnston at amfAR NYC Event
“London patient” Adam Castillejo (left) speaks during an event hosted by amfAR in New York City on Oct. 19, which was moderated by amfAR's Director of Research Rowena Johnston, Ph.D. Juan Michael Porter II

Adam Castillejo, the "London Patient"

In March 2020, more than 13 years after Brown was cured of his infection, researchers confirmed that the feat had finally been repeated.

A man living in London, Adam Castillejo, faced with a similar situation to Timothy Ray Brown—a cancer (this time Hodgkin lymphoma) that failed to respond to treatment. He underwent allogenic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation after hitting the transplant jackpot: He was matched with a donor whose CD4 cells had a rare mutation that made it impossible for most strains of HIV to infect them. And, for only the second time in history, the attempt worked

The news was initially announced at a major research conference in 2019, but it took another year for experts in the field to begin to feel comfortable calling Castillejo’s case a cure. That’s because HIV has proven incredibly difficult to eradicate entirely from the human body; as we’ll get into later in this story, sometimes HIV can re-emerge from hidden reservoirs in the body after months or years following a treatment that aimed to cure the infection. That has made researchers extremely cautious about whether to term a person “cured” of HIV or instead go with a more accurate and easily verifiable phrase, “long-term remission.”

For a long time, Castillejo intentionally remained anonymous, not wanting his newfound cured status to swallow up his life. But he ultimately decided that he had a role to play in ending HIV stigma, and now speaks publicly about his life before and after being cured.


The “Düsseldorf Patient”

Although the allopathic stem cell transplant procedure that had cured Timothy Ray Brown was complicated and risky, clinician-researchers nonetheless saw it for what it was: a potential option for people living with HIV in cases where the transplant represented a dangerous-but-critical opportunity to reverse their advanced cancer. Several such procedures were attempted in the 2010s.

A rare success appears to have been achieved with the “Düsseldorf patient,” a man with acute myeloid leukemia who received an allogeneic stem cell transplant in 2013 (when he was in his 40s) in which the donor had the ultra-rare homozygous CCR5-delta 32 mutation that confers resistance to most HIV strains. After an initial report in 2016 that he had no proviral HIV DNA (but was still on antiretroviral therapy), little additional data were revealed—until 2023.

In February 2023, an in-depth research paper was published in Nature Medicine detailing out the lack of replicable HIV within the Düsseldorf patient four years after he stopped antiretroviral therapy. The authors of the paper used the word “cure” to describe his case.


Yvonne Bryson speaks at a virtual press conference during CROI 2022
Yvonne Bryson, M.D., discusses a new case of HIV remission in a virtual press conference during CROI 2022. Courtesy of CROI 2022

The “New York Patient”

One of the challenges of HIV cure research in the 2000s and 2010s was the inherent danger of the allopathic stem cell transplant procedure itself, which dramatically restricted the number of potential beneficiaries. That is why, in addition to the incredibly small number of successful attempts to reproduce the results that cured Timothy Ray Brown, researchers have also been exploring alternative approaches that are both safer and more easily replicable.

One such route was reported in early 2022 at the annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections. There, researchers presented the case of the “New York patient,” a woman of mixed race who received a different kind of stem-cell transplant in 2017. Like the cure cases before her, the New York patient was living with HIV and acute myeloid leukemia; unlike those cases, however, the procedure she undertook was a haplo-cord transplant, which involved the use of umbilical cord blood from a partially matching donor with the CCR5-delta 32 mutation. Doctors also enhanced the odds of success by transplanting peripheral blood mononuclear cells from a relative who was a partial match.

Follow-up data published in the journal Cell in March 2023 further support the findings that were initially presented in 2022: The New York patient appears to be the first woman and first person of mixed race to have been successfully cured of HIV. What makes her case particularly exciting is that, because cord blood stem cells are a much more widely available resource relative to allogenic stem cells and the procedure is somewhat safer, experts believe that the procedure that appears to have cured both her HIV and leukemia could potentially be used to achieve the same results in dozens of individuals per year who are in similar situations.


Jana Dickter, M.D.
Jana Dickter, M.D., of the City of Hope comprehensive cancer center, discusses the latest patient to be potentially cured of HIV on August 1 at the 24th International AIDS Conference in Montreal, Canada. Source: International AIDS Society

Paul Edmonds, the “City of Hope Patient”

At the moment, we know of one other individual who appears to have been cured of HIV—or is at least in long-term HIV remission—following a stem cell transplant. Initially referred to as the “City of Hope patient,” the man has since publicly disclosed his name: Paul Edmonds, a man in his 60s living in California.

Edmonds’ case was presented at the International AIDS Conference in August 2022. Many of the particulars about his procedure are similar to that of Brown, Castillejo, and the Düsseldorf patient: living with HIV and acute myeloid leukemia; received chemotherapy and a stem-cell transplant from a donor with the homozygous CCR5 delta 32 mutation; is cancer-free and showing no signs of HIV rebound despite being off of antiretroviral therapy for well over a year.

But a few details make Edmonds’ case unique. For one thing, he is older than the other potentially cured individuals: He was 63 when he received his transplant in 2019. He also had been living with HIV the longest, having been diagnosed in 1988. In part due to his age, Edmonds also received a less-intensive chemotherapy regimen, which reduced the chances for complications (apparently without compromising the odds for success).

This combination of details further buttresses hope that we can continue to expand the number of individuals living with HIV for whom these procedures can be viable.


This article was originally published March 6, 2019 and most recently updated April 21, 2023.