Campaign aims to rid Hawaii of virus that causes AIDS

Only one person has ever been cured of HIV.

“Unfortunately, I’m the only one,” Timothy Ray Brown said at news conference Tuesday. “I don’t want to be the last one. I want there to be many others cured.”

Brown, the renowned Berlin patient whose recovery was chronicled in the New England Journal of Medicine, is in Honolulu to help kick off a multimillion-dollar initiative that aims to transform Hawaii into the first HIV-free state in the U.S.

The event was held in conjunction with World AIDS Day.

The Hawaii 2 Zero (H20) Cure Initiative is the name of the campaign being launched by the Hawaii Center for AIDS, an academic program of the University of Hawaii John A. Burns School of Medicine that focuses on HIV education, research and service.

A conference describing the campaign and the latest in HIV cure and prevention will be held from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday at the UH Cancer Center’s Sullivan Conference Center.

The day will feature a blessing and open house of a new Kakaako clinic largely dedicated to the Hawaii Center for AIDS and its patients.

With about 2,900 people living in Hawaii with HIV/AIDS and the state seeing new cases all the time, the task of making Hawaii HIV-free appears rather daunting.

But officials insist Hawaii has what it takes to reach the goal.

“Hawaii is really the best place to launch something like this,” said Dr. Cecilia Shikuma, UH professor of medicine.

HIV infection rates are modest here compared with other states, she explained, and Hawaii is relatively isolated, which puts it in position to better manage the epidemic.

“This is certainly not Washington, D.C., or New York City,” Shikuma said.

Shikuma said Hawaii also has a committed and dedicated community of public health professionals and patients, making it easier to conduct outreach, education and prevention and cure research.

“Our HIV research community has a strong track record of working well together,” she said. “We think we can pull the whole thing together and launch something really exciting in Hawaii.”

Brown was diagnosed with HIV in 1995 while going to college in Berlin.

Over a period of 11 years, he was treated with antiretroviral therapy, a combination of medicines that inhibit the replication of HIV in the body.

Then, in 2006, Brown was diagnosed with leukemia and started chemotherapy. A year later he received a stem cell transplant to treat the white blood cell cancer. Soon afterward traces of his HIV vanished.

“It took me a long, long, long, long time to believe I was actually cured,” he remembered.

Only after a scientific paper describing the cure was published did he really believe it, he said.

Researchers have tried to replicate the cure but have fallen short. Today no one is exactly sure what part of Brown’s treatment may have cured him, officials said.

Nevertheless, the cure has re-energized HIV research worldwide — and helped inspire the effort in Hawaii for which the university is applying for $6 million in funding.

Under the Hawaii 2 Zero initiative, officials said they plan is double their efforts to prevent new infections and are proposing research to figure out how to implement the most effective Hawaii-specific HIV prevention efforts to pave the way for HIV eradication.

They also plan to continue administering antiretroviral therapy for Hawaii’s HIV infected population. The suppressive HIV therapy does not cure the disease, but it can drastically reduce the amount of virus left in the body, making it easier to eradicate all virus from the body, officials said.

They also plan to accelerate research in a quest to find a cure.

The cure is important, Shikuma said, because HIV therapies are expensive and those who are infected are susceptible to increased risk of heart attacks, dementia, liver problems and other complications of aging.

Are we close to finding a cure?

“We’re not very close,” Shikuma said. “Otherwise Timothy Brown wouldn’t be the only one without HIV. But (his cure is) proof of a concept that it’s possible. Someone’s been cured, and it’s galvanized the world to really find out how to replicate and move forward.”

Dr. Lishomwa Ndhlovu, UH associate professor in the Department of Tropical Medicine, said that in the 1990s people were wondering whether there would ever be a drug to treat HIV.

“Now we have over 25 drugs that work remarkably well,” he said. “Today the question is, Can we eradicate HIV? And this is the spark that we need.”

Brown, who is originally from Seattle, has dedicated his life to raising awareness and helping search for a cure. He is now editor of the Cure Report and co-founder of both the Cure for AIDS Coalition and World AIDS Institute.

A slender man with short brown hair and a scruffy beard, Brown said he remains hopeful a cure is out there for some 33.2 million people afflicted by HIV around the world.

“Once it can be done, it can be done again,” he said. “I believe finding a cure is possible.”