By: Kathy Wu

Human immunodeficiency virus, (HIV) is a virus that attacks white blood cells, or cells that fight infection. Not only was the virus uncurable, but it increased the risk of many deadly cancers.

That was until scientists created a stem cell transplant that changed people’s lives forever. A 66-year-old man, who had lived more than half his life with the virus, is now safe from all Kaposi’s Sarcoma, non-Hodgkins lymphoma, cervical, heart disease, diabetes, and brain cancer which are diseases that are strongly associated with HIV.

“This is one step in the long road to cure,” said William Haseltine, a Harvard Medical School professor, who founded in the university’s HIV/AIDS research departments. Timothy Ray Brown, a HIV patient, was one of the first to be cured. He was cured in Berlin where he was known as “the Berlin patient” and no longer had HIV in his blood. Similar achievements followed in patients in London, New York and Düsseldorf, Germany.

However, the treatment is unavailable to about 38 million HIV patients, including 1.2 million in the United States. In addition, statistics show that approximately 30 percent of patients die within a year of the procedure.

Researchers must find a way to cure enough of the right cells and find a way to do it in larger numbers of people. Most people don’t have access to the healthcare that they need. But this is only the beginning. “The message to people living with HIV is that this is a signal of hope,” said a HIV physician. “It is feasible. It has been replicated again. It’s also a signal that the scientific community is really engaged with trying to solve this puzzle.”