A decade after the first person was cured of HIV, a second patient is in long-term remission

A man has been in remission from HIV for a year and a half, without drugs, after receiving a stem cell transplant of virus-resistant cells — raising the prospect that he has become the second person to be cured of HIV infection.

The anonymous case, referred to as the “London patient” by researchers, was cautiously reported in the journal Nature as still too “premature” to be declared a cure, but is a long-awaited advance. It was scheduled to be announced Tuesday at an HIV conference in Seattle, 12 years after Timothy Ray Brown, known in medical circles as the “Berlin patient” was cured by a similar stem cell transplant, galvanizing the field of HIV research and sparking the search for a cure.