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Two Berlin PatientsAccording to the link below, in 2011 people on an MIT blog were discussing the confusion of the original Berlin patient (i.e. a guy who experienced testicular distress, hepatitus A, and an apparent spontaneous cure) with the widely reported "Berlin Patient" (Timothy Brown) whose story of a reconstituted HIV-free immune system broke roughly nine years later.
A journalist named Rob Waters attempts to clear up the conflation of the identities of the two men:
I think you're confusing the issue and getting too hung up on the provenance of the phrase, ``the Berlin patient.'' Yes, there was another but they're not the same guy and they didn't have the same procedure. Berlin patientn #2, if you want to call him that, went from HIV-infected to having no detectable virus after receiving a stem-cell transplant and has captivated AIDS researchers for that reason.
Note also, that Sangamo is mentioned in the context of this discussion.
For further coincidence, Mark Schoofs—the author of the 1998 article that identified the first guy as "The Berlin Patient" ( http://www.nytimes.com/1998/06/21/magazine/the-berlin-patient.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm ) in 2008 wrote about a patient who matches Tim Brown's profile ( http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122602394113507555.html ). Curiously, Schoofs did not use the moniker "The Berlin Patient" in his later article as he did in the first.
The final paragraph of the piece is rather stirring, though sad. I include it here because it proved to be an early harbinger of what was to come regarding the CCR5 mutation:
In 1989, Dr. Rossi had a case eerily similar to the one in Berlin. A 41-year-old patient with AIDS and lymphoma underwent radiation and drug therapy to ablate his bone marrow and received new cells from a donor. It is not known if those cells had the protective CCR5 mutation, because its relation to HIV hadn't been discovered yet. But after the transplant, HIV disappeared from the patient's blood. The patient died of his cancer 47 days after the procedure. Autopsy tests from eight organs and the tumor revealed no HIV.
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Finally, further confirmation of the two separate identities of the Berlin men comes in a piece from the following link:
This Berlin Patient was the first individual known to have achieved “remission” of HIV, and the case made headlines around the world, including a profile in the New York Times Magazine. Lori’s team presented further details at CROI 1999 and in the May 27, 1999, New England Journal of Medicine. By that time, Berlin Patient #1 had been off treatment for about two years, still with no plasma viral rebound. But traces of HIV RNA were detected in his lymph nodes, and replication-competent virus was isolated from a small number of resting CD4 T-cells after Robert Siliciano developed a sensitive test.
Although his HIV was not eradicated, the man’s immune system managed to control the virus, demonstrating that a functional cure is within the realm of possibility. “I’ve never met him, and I don’t even know his name, but I’ve followed his case,” a member of an HIV positive support group told journalist Mark Schoofs. “He is what we want to be.”
The second Berlin Patient came to the world’s attention a decade later. An American man living in Germany, he underwent treatment for acute myeloid leukemia at Berlin’s Charité Medical University in 2006. At that time, he had been HIV positive for more than ten years and on ART for four years, and had undetectable viral load. But he had a history of high viral load and disease progression, so was not a natural elite controller.
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