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: HIV-specific humoral immunity
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On Monday February 3rd it was announced that HVTN 702, a large-scale HIV vaccine efficacy trial taking place in South Africa, had found no evidence of protection against HIV acquisition. The information emerged from a pre-planned review of interim results conducted by the trial’s Data Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB), which revealed roughly equal numbers of…
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The pharmaceutical industry has made significant contributions to HIV vaccine research, but it has been rare for a major company to take the leading role in propelling a candidate toward efficacy testing. The only example to date occurred around the turn of the millennium with Merck’s adenovirus serotype 5 (Ad5) vector, which showed some evidence…
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The annual Conference on Retroviruses & Opportunistic Infections (CROI) took place in Seattle from February 13th-16th, offering a dizzying parade of new data. Webcasts of presentations and PDF files of posters were rapidly placed online and are accessible via the CROI website. A Fillip for Kick & Kill On the cure research front, the results…
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The 2016 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) took place in Boston from February 22-25. CROI deserves kudos for pioneering comprehensive webcasting, and all sessions are available for viewing online. Results from several significant cure-related clinical trials were debuted during the meeting (links to the webcasts are in parentheses): Ole Søgaard from Aarhus University in…
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A paper published earlier this month in Science augurs a major new effort to advance a prime-boost HIV vaccine strategy into human efficacy trials. The vaccine components are manufactured by Crucell Holland B.V, which is now one of the Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson, and—in a very welcome development for the HIV vaccine…
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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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Following up on the prior post about broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs) against HIV, there is now a free database available (http://bnaber.org) that offers detailed information on all known bNAbs. The genesis and purpose of the database is described in an open access paper in the journal Nucleic Acids Research. Although not a focus of the paper,…
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HIV is notoriously stubborn in its ability to thwart attacks by antibodies. The sugary outer envelope of the virus is so effective in cloaking its vulnerabilities that, for many years, the number of antibodies known to have broad neutralizing activity against HIV could be counted on one hand. But recently, collaborative research efforts aiming to…
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A study published on September 12th by the journal Immunity ties together two emerging areas of HIV vaccine research. In recent years, scientists have discovered that a small proportion of chronically infected individuals develop antibody responses capable of broadly neutralizing a diverse array HIV isolates. These antibody responses typically take years to develop, and are…
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Last year Steven Yukl from UCSF presented the results of an exhaustive search for HIV genetic material in Timothy Brown (aka the Berlin Patient)—the one adult individual considered cured of the infection. The study engendered controversy, because a few of the multiple independent laboratories that participated did obtain positive readings for trace amounts of HIV RNA…