An HIV-positive man apparently has become the second known person in the world to be free of the AIDS virus.

The London man has not been identified.

Doctors said the patient received a bone marrow transplant three years ago from a donor who is HIV resistant.

The man stopped taking anti-HIV drugs in September 2017, according to news reports.

“There is no virus there that we can measure. We can’t detect anything,” professor and HIV biologist Dr. Ravindra Gupta told Reuters. Gupta helped lead a team of doctors who treated the man.

Timothy Ray Brown, known as the "Berlin patient," became the first such successful transplant patient nearly 12 years ago.

Brown was put into an induced coma and nearly died.

The transplant is considered dangerous and has failed in other patients.

The research was published online Monday in the journal, Nature.

"This will inspire people that cure is not a dream,” Dr. Annemarie Wensing, a virologist at the University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands, told The New York Times. “It’s reachable."

The London patient was diagnosed with HIV in 2003. He developed cancer and agreed to a stem cell transplant to treat the cancer in 2016.

Source: WLWT Cincinnati

BDST: 1720 HRS, MAR 5, 2019
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