TAG HIV Basic Science, Vaccines, and Cure Project Blog
By Richard Jefferys, Project Director at Treatment Action Group (TAG).
recent posts
- 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
- TAG’s HIV Cure-Related Clinical Research Listing: Background on the November 2025 Update
- TAG’s HIV Cure-Related Clinical Research Listing: Background on the October 2025 Update
- TAG’s HIV Cure-Related Clinical Research Listing: Background on the September 2025 Update
Category: Aging
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For March, April, and May 2025, there were 38 updates to entries in TAG’s listing. The majority involved the addition of links to results presented at the annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) in San Francisco. As is covered further below, this period has seen a horrific and unprecedented political attack on scientific…
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Inflammation is increasingly recognized as an immunological double-edged sword: it contributes importantly to the response to infection, but can also cause serious collateral damage to the body—particularly when persistent—and has been implicated as potentially contributing to multiple conditions, including heart disease and cancers. Researchers have found that the anti-inflammatory effects of statin drugs contribute to…
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Since posting recently about studies investigating the relevance of the CD4/CD8 ratio in the antiretroviral therapy era, several new papers and presentations have provided more information on the topic. Last week in the open access journal PLoS Pathogens, Sergio Serrano-Villar and colleagues reported evidence that a low CD4/CD8 ratio (less than or equal to 0.4)—despite…
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A subset of HIV-positive people who initiate antiretroviral therapy (ART) and achieve suppression of HIV replication experience poor recovery of CD4 T cell numbers. Terms used to describe this subset of individuals include “discordant responders” and “immunological non-responders” (INRs). As yet, there is no universally accepted definition of INRs and a variety of CD4 T…
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An inversion of the normal ratio between CD4 and CD8 T cells was noted in the very first case reports of individuals with AIDS, before HIV was even identified. Although a number of studies subsequently reported an association between the CD4/CD8 ratio and risk of disease progression, CD4 T cell counts were more extensively researched…
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The December 1st issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases contains a raft of papers addressing the issue of HIV and aging (abstracts and links below). A report from the Swiss HIV Cohort Study documents that illnesses typically associated with aging are now the most common causes of morbidity in their cohort, which contains an increasing proportion…