TAG HIV Basic Science, Vaccines, and Cure Project Blog
By Richard Jefferys, Project Director at Treatment Action Group (TAG).
recent posts
- HIV Cure Research at AIDS 2026
- In The News: CAR-T Cells for HIV
- TAG’s HIV Cure-Related Clinical Research Listing: Background on the March 2026 Update
- TAG’s HIV Cure-Related Clinical Research Listing: Background on the February 2026 Update
- TAG’s HIV Cure-Related Clinical Research Listing: Background on the December 2025 and January 2026 Updates
Category: Adeno-associated viruses
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There are seven updates in the July 2024 revision to TAG’s listing. New Additions Only one new cure-related clinical trial was identified in registries over the past month, which is a revised version of a protocol that was previously withdrawn. The study is sponsored by the US Military HIV Research Program (MHRP), and will assess…
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No new HIV cure-related trials or studies were added to the clinicaltrials.gov registry over the past month. A total of eight updates have been made to TAG’s listing: A phase II study sponsored by AbbVie that was added to the listing in September (see prior blog update) is now open for enrollment. The company initiated…
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The past year has seen a notable expansion of efforts to apply gene therapy approaches to HIV cure research, and several online events have highlighted progress in the field. In parallel, work is underway that aims to make gene therapies more affordable and accessible globally. Two papers published early in the year (one in the…
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Many years ago, Phil Johnson from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia began pursuing a novel workaround to overcome the challenge of inducing broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs) against HIV. The idea borrows from gene therapy, using adeno-associated virus (AAV) as a vector to deliver the genetic code for a bNAb into the body. The aim is…
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The 2019 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) took place in Seattle from March 3rd-7th. The major news on the cure research front was the possibility of two additional cases similar to Timothy Ray Brown, who for the past 12 years has been the only individual considered cured of HIV infection (TAG issued a…
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The idea of using adeno-associated virus (AAV) as a vehicle to deliver genes encoding anti-HIV broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs) has been around for some time, and has been covered a number of times previously on the blog (e.g. see posts from May 2009 and January 2013). The approach was first developed by Phil Johnson as a possible…
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One of the more futuristic-sounding ideas for curing HIV infection involves trying to remove the genome of the virus from the genome of the cells into which it has integrated. On paper, the idea is very appealing, but there are a multitude of challenges associated with trying to identify integrated HIV DNA (referred to as…
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The past decade has seen a boom in the identification of antibodies capable of potently neutralizing a broad array of different HIV isolates (broadly neutralizing antibodies or bNAbs). New technologies that allow antibodies to be fished from huge numbers of individual B cells and tested for activity have spurred this rapid acceleration of discovery. There…
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A paper published yesterday in Nature has stirred considerable excitement and widespread media coverage. Led by the laboratory of Michael Farzan at The Scripps Research Institute, the research involves a newly designed inhibitor of HIV named eCD4-Ig. The inhibitor is designed to bind the HIV envelope at sites that attach to CD4 and CCR5 molecules…
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Two recent papers address the potential of broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs) to decrease HIV rebound from persistent reservoirs. In the journal Cell, Ariel Halper-Stromberg and colleagues report the results of experiments conducted in the humanized mouse model with a “tri-mix” of three monoclonal bNAbs: 3BNC117, 10-1074, and PG16. When administered as post-exposure prophylaxis four days…