TAG HIV Basic Science, Vaccines, and Cure Project Blog
By Richard Jefferys, Project Director at Treatment Action Group (TAG).
recent posts
- 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
- TAG’s HIV Cure-Related Clinical Research Listing: Background on the November 2025 Update
Category: HIV-specific T cell immunity
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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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Several media outlets are reporting on a newly published study of elite controllers, a rare subset of people with HIV who suppress viral load to low or undetectable levels without treatment. A major impetus for the interest is a finding that one long-term elite controller, Loreen Willenberg, may have cleared all the intact HIV from…
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One of the most widely discussed and publicized ideas for targeting the HIV reservoir is “kick and kill” or “shock and kill.” The aim is to kick dormant, latent HIV into revealing itself so the cells that contain the virus are visible to the immune system; the kill aspect involves trying to enhance the immune…
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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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A paper published in the Journal of Virology on January 2nd reports that the nefarious activities of HIV’s Nef protein can influence the size of the persistent viral reservoir in people on ART. Nef is known to be able to shield HIV-infected cells from recognition by the immune system, and Fredrick Omondi and colleagues found that…
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Over the past few months, several interesting papers addressing elite control of HIV infection have seen publication. The ability of elite controllers to maintain undetectable viral loads and relatively preserved CD4 T cell counts in the absence of ART has led them to be proposed as a model for a functional cure of HIV infection.…
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The question of how HIV latency is typically established in long-lived memory CD4 T cells has yet to be fully resolved. One theory is that latency occurs when HIV infects a CD4 T cell that is in the process of transitioning from an activated state to a resting state, but direct evidence has been lacking.…
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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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Since the earliest days of HIV research, the idea of trying to enhance immune responses to the virus using therapeutic vaccination has been extensively explored, but with little success. The ability of the virus to compromise CD4 T cells, which would normally coordinate antiviral immunity, may be one contributor to the generally disappointing results. Virus-induced…