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: Immunosenescence
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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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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…
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Many studies have reported that regular exercise confers health benefits and that, conversely, a sedentary lifestyle is a major risk factor for morbidity and mortality (particularly from cardiovascular disease). In recent years, researchers have begun to look more specifically at the immunological effects of exercise. The scientist Richard Simpson, formerly at Napier University in Edinburgh…
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This past Wednesday May 11, the journal Nature published a vaccine experiment in rhesus macaques that has drawn widespread media coverage. Led by Louis Picker at the Oregon Health and Science University’s Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute (VGTI), researchers used cytomegalovirus (CMV) as a vaccine vector to immunize against the highly virulent and pathogenic SIVmac239…
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A number of studies have documented that the body’s machinery for producing new immune system cells is impaired by HIV infection. In a new paper in the journal Blood, Delphine Sauce and colleagues delve into the issue further by analyzing circulating CD34+ hematopoietic progenitor cells (HPC) in over one hundred HIV positive individuals at various…
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Following on the heels of yesterday’s post, a study has just been published by the journal AIDS that echoes the same themes. The researchers, led by Victor Appay, find that depletion of naïve CD4 and CD8 T cells represents the major parallel between HIV infection and aging and, like Beth Jamieson’s group, they note that…
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I wrote recently about a review by Beth Jamieson and Tammy Rickabaugh describing the parallel effects of HIV infection and aging on the pool of naïve T cells in humans. Three recent papers address different aspects of naïve T cell loss, including the first study to document a decrease in this population in people with chronic…
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In the early 1990s, UCLA researcher Janis Giorgi published evidence that the activation of the immune system by HIV (as measured by expression of a marker called CD38 on CD8 T cells) was a strong predictor of the pace of progression to AIDS. At the time the idea was controversial, but a voluminous amount of evidence…
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The key cells of the adaptive immune system – CD4 T cells, CD8 T cells and B cells – are each divided into two vast pools in the body: naïve cells, which have not yet encountered an antigen to respond to, and memory cells, which are descendents of naïve cells that met an antigen and…