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CURED
How the Berlin Patients Defeated HIV
Nathalia Holt
Could the end of the greatest pandemic of our time be
upon us? An award-winning research scientist tells the
historic story of how insights gathered from two ordinary
patients have indeed led to a practical cure for HIV.
They are each known in medical journals as the Berlin Patient. Their cures came
twelve years apart, the first in 1996 and the second in 2008. Each received his own
very different treatment in Berlin, Germany, and each result spurred a new field of
investigation, fueling innovative lines of research and sparking hope for the thirtyfour
million people currently infected with HIV. For the first time, Nathalia Holt, an
HIV fellow at the Ragon Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who has participated
in some of the most fruitful research in the field, tells the story of how we came to
arrive at this astounding and controversial turning point.
Holt explores the two men’s stories on a personal level, looking at how their
experiences have influenced HIV researchers worldwide—including one very special
young family doctor who took the time to look closely at his patients—and how they
responded to their medications.
Based on exclusive interviews with the patients and their doctors as well as her
own in-depth research, this book is an unprecedented look at how scientists pursue
their inquiries, the human impact their research has, and what is and is not working
in the relationship between Big Pharma and medical care.
EXCERPT | The baby was HIV positive. To the surprise of her physicians, the virus slowly
disappeared in the baby, becoming undetectable by day thirty. Now, two years later, doctors
felt confident in calling the child cured.
Only a few years earlier, physicians wouldn’t have dared to use the C-word. But now,
Timothy’s influence was so great in the HIV community that physicians were no longer afraid
to use the word cure. Unacknowledged but just as influential was Christian, the first Berlin
patient, the impetus behind the clinical trials testing early therapy. Here in this one child lay
the combined promise of both Berlin patients.
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