A Toronto man is set to be the first Canadian to be cured of HIV following a stem cell transplant.
The 62-year-old patient was diagnosed with HIV in 1999 and was not expected to survive longer than six months as he was also battling a rare and aggressive cancer—Stage 4 Burkitt lymphoma—which had spread to his brain and lymph nodes.
The patient’s diagnosis came at the time of the introduction of antiretroviral therapy, also known as ART, which can stop HIV from reproducing and extend the average life expectancies for patients to a near normal length.
But HIV patients by and large have to be on ART for the rest of their lives. The genetic material of HIV can be buried into the immune system’s memory cells, allowing for the virus to hide and resurge once a patient comes off of the treatment.
The Toronto patient had been taking ART to suppress virus levels since his initial diagnosis. But in 2021, he received a stem cell transplant for his cancer that acted as a “double cure” because it contained a rare genetic mutation resistant to HIV: CCR5-delta32.
This same process was used in 2009, when the “Berlin patient” became the first person to be effectively cured of HIV after undergoing a stem cell transplant for his acute myeloid leukemia. Similar treatments have since been implemented in patients in London, Düsseldorf and Oslo.
Four years after the Toronto patient’s stem cell transplant, he was able to stop taking ART in July 2025 and is now in sustained remission with undetectable levels of HIV as of April 2026. If he remains at that level for 20 months, he will join a group of 10 people across the globe considered to be cured of HIV.
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