evidence: The first person to be cured of HIV was Timothy Ray Brown, an American who received a pioneering stem cell transplant back in 2007, six years before Franke. There are now seven patients who have been cured. The latest case was revealed at AIDS 2024, the 25th International AIDS Conference, in Munich last week, although this patient has requested anonymity. [...] Finally, and most important, in many cases, such stem cell transplants do not eliminate the virus from the body. An international collaboration called IciStem has begun collecting tissue from the dozens of HIV patients who have received such transplants. The goal is to understand more about why individuals like Franke have been cured while others were not. "The question is why was it successful in these seven cases?" says Christian Gaebler, the doctor at Berlin’s Charité hospital who presented data on the latest patient to be cured at AIDS 2024. "Were there features in the patient which gave them a better starting point to achieve HIV remission or was there something unique about the immune responses of the donor, which created a better chance of depleting these HIV reservoirs."