The London Patient: Life after HIV

Few people can truly understand Adam Castillejo’s journey to being cured of HIV. Timothy Ray Brown was one of them.

“The first time we spoke, he said, ‘Brother, welcome to the family,’” Castillejo recalls. “That was his warm, caring message to me, and it gave me such a sense of acceptance from him.”

Like Castillejo, Brown, initially known as the Berlin Patient, had lived with HIV for years before being diagnosed with blood cancer—Hodgkin lymphoma in Castillejo’s case; acute myeloid leukemia in Brown’s. Both underwent treatment with chemotherapy before undergoing a bone marrow transplant from a donor with a rare genetic mutation known as CCR5-delta32, which blocks HIV from entering T cells. The treatments—Castillejo’s in 2016, Brown’s nearly a decade earlier—cured both men of HIV by replacing their immune cells with resistant cells carrying the mutation.

At first known only as the London Patient, Castillejo, 41, revealed his identity in a March 2020 article in The New York Times. His medical team had initially advised him to remain anonymous and focus on recuperating. Within a year, as his health improved, Castillejo decided he had a responsibility to the scientific and HIV communities to come forward.

“I want to be an ambassador of hope,” Castillejo says. “I want to represent the future. We have to prepare everyone, mentally and physically, for the journey ahead.”

Read the full story at POZ.