Patient cured of HIV and leukemia ‘extremely grateful’ 5 years later

Health

By Adriana Diaz

Five years after receiving a life-changing stem cell transplant, a 68-year-old man says he’s “extremely grateful” to be essentially cured of acute myelogenous leukemia and in HIV remission.

“Many City of Hope doctors, scientists, nurses, supportive care professionals and others made it possible for me to be cured of leukemia and in remission for HIV. I can’t thank them enough,” Paul Edmonds of Desert Springs, Calif., said in a statement last week about the California-based cancer treatment hospital.

Edmonds is one of only five people in the world to achieve full remission of HIV — and he had the virus the longest — for over 31 years — among the five patients.

Edmonds was diagnosed with AIDS in 1988. He convinced his future husband, Arnie House, to get tested as well. House was HIV positive.

Years of antiretroviral treatments brought their HIV levels to undetectable, meaning the virus was untransmissable but still present.

It wasn’t until 2018, when Edmonds was diagnosed with leukemia, that a plan for both illnesses began to form.

“I wasn’t ready to die,” he told ABC News last year.

After chemotherapy, Edmonds received the stem cell transplant — a high-risk procedure that has the potential to weaken the immune system — at City of Hope on Feb. 6, 2019.

The stem cells had an incredibly rare HIV-resistant gene mutation, homozygous CCR5 Delta 32.

The cancer treatment center announced Edmonds’ miraculous treatment, but at the time he was only known as the anonymous “City of Hope patient.”

Globally, the World Health Organization estimated over 39 million people were living with HIV in 2022.

The virus can be managed with antiretroviral therapy (ART), a combination of drugs that stops HIV from reproducing.

Edmonds will be considered cured of HIV after he has ceased ART for five years — it’s been nearly three years since he has taken the meds.

Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), meanwhile, reduces the chance of getting HIV from sex or the use of injection drugs.

Timothy Ray Brown, otherwise known as the “Berlin patient,” was the first person to enter HIV remission, after receiving bone marrow and stem cell transplants in 2007 and 2008, effectively being cured of the AIDS-causing virus and leukemia. He died in 2020 after battling cancer at age 54.

In 2019, a German man was also cured of the virus with a stem cell transplant, but it wasn’t until last year that clinicians could confirm his virus-free status.

A New York woman also entered remission from HIV and leukemia in 2022, becoming the first woman to have successfully undergone the treatment.

A European man known as the “Geneva patient” has reportedly been in remission from the virus for about three years following a similar procedure, potentially making him the sixth person to be cured.