The late Timothy Ray Brown, pictured in Seattle in 2019, was the first person worldwide to be cured of HIV infection. The exclusive club is poised to add an 11th member, a 62-year-old Canadian man.The Associated Press
It feels like a deal with the devil: We can cure you of AIDS, but only if you first get a nasty cancer, undergo punishing treatment and find a donor with a rare genetic mutation willing to donate stem cells you need to survive.
In other words, it takes a near-impossible combination of factors that create a treatment regime that is brutal, expensive and not scalable.
Yet, as we learned this weekend, a Canadian has now been cured of AIDS.
Toronto man poised to become the first Canadian cured of HIV
Yes, cured. And by that, scientists mean that HIV has been eliminated from his body – an astonishing feat of medicine.
The 62-year-old man becomes only the 11th person in history to join this elite club.
As impractical as the cure is for the almost 41 million other people on the planet infected with the human immunodeficiency virus, you can’t help but marvel at the science.
Each case is slightly different and adds to the body of knowledge.
It began with Timothy Ray Brown, an American known initially as the Berlin Patient. He was diagnosed with HIV in 1995, and with acute myeloid leukemia in 2007.
From 2012: Meet the 'Berlin Patient' who was cured of HIV
The treatment for AML is a bone marrow transplant. Mr. Brown’s oncologist, Gero Hütter, had the novel idea of finding a donor with two copies of a genetic mutation known as CCR5-Delta-32, which renders cells almost impervious to HIV infection.
The approach worked. After two stem cell transplants, Mr. Brown was virus-free, and remained so, even though he stopped taking antiretroviral therapy, until he died of recurrence of cancer in 2020 at the age of 54.
It would be years before the novel approach was tried again.
The London Patient, Adam Castillejo, was diagnosed with HIV in 2003 and Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2012. He also received a transplant from a donor with a double CCR5 mutation, but continued antiretroviral therapy until 2017.
The Düsseldorf Patient, Marc Franke, was diagnosed with HIV in 2008 and AML in 2016. He has the distinction of being the first person to receive a stem cell transplant from a person of the opposite sex.
The first three men cured of AIDS all suffered severe bouts of graft-versus-host disease, a potentially fatal illness caused by the body rejecting donor cells.
After those initial success stories came variations on the theme.
Dr. Sharon Walmsley treated the Toronto Patient, who has been in prolonged HIV remission since 2021.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
At 66, Paul Edmonds, the City of Hope Patient, became the oldest person cured of AIDS, after living more than 30 years with the condition.
The New York Patient, the first woman cured of AIDS, was treated with a combination of stem cells and umbilical cord blood. (She is mixed-race, and the CCR5 mutation is found almost exclusively in white people of European descent.)
The Geneva Patient, treated for myeloid sarcoma in 2018, became the first patient to receive a stem cell transplant from a donor without a CCR5-Delta-32 mutation.
The seventh person cured of AIDS, dubbed the Next Berlin Patient, received a stem cell transplant from a donor with a single copy of the CCR5 mutation.
In 2025, three more were added to the list of the cured: The French Patient, a woman in her 50s; the 67-year-old Chicago Patient; and the Oslo Patient, a 63-year-old Norwegian man whose brother donated his stem cells.
Now the spotlight is on Canada.
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The 11th person cured of AIDS is the Toronto Patient, a 62-year-old diagnosed with HIV and Burkitt lymphoma. He has been HIV-free since his transplant in 2021.
Worldwide, there have been at least 40 people with HIV treated with stem cell transplants, according to the IciStem consortium. Some died, some continued to have HIV in their system and others have continued antiretroviral therapy.
There is also a small cohort of people who remain HIV-free after stopping antiretroviral therapy without stem cell transplants. These “post-treatment controllers” all received treatment within weeks of infection before HIV could settle into reservoirs.
In one long-term study, seven of 10 patients have had undetectable virus levels for at least a decade after stopping treatment.
While few have been cured, most people living with HIV now keep illness at bay with antiretrovirals, which keep the virus from replicating.
Progress against the worst pandemic in history has been slow but steady. Worldwide, about 31.6 million of the 40.8 million people living with HIV benefit from the drug treatment. One-pill-a-day regimes now exist.
Efforts continue at trying to create a vaccine that protects against HIV. And new approaches, like CAR-T therapy, used to treat some cancers, could be adapted to HIV.
But a key goal – a cure – remains devilishly elusive, except for a select few, including one lucky man in Toronto.