53-year-old man becomes 5th person to be cured of HIV 

A 53-year-old man in Germany has become the fifth person to be cured of HIV, researchers have announced. To protect the privacy of the patient, researchers have named him as “the Dusseldorf patient,” ABC News reported.

While the researchers announced his successful treatment at a conference in 2019, they could not confirm he had been officially cured at that time.

The Dusseldorf patient was cured after a stem cell transplant, usually only performed on cancer patients who don’t have any other options.

A stem cell transplant is a high-risk procedure that effectively replaces a person’s immune system. The primary goal is to cure someone’s cancer, but the procedure has also led to HIV cure in a handful of cases.

The first person with the HIV cure was Timothy Ray Brown. Researchers published his case as the Berlin patient in 2009. That was followed by the London patient published in 2019. Most recently, The City of Hope and New York patients were published in 2022.