Category: Inflammation

  • There are twelve updates to the listing this month: four new interventional trials and one observational study have been added (all yet to start recruiting), a planned observational study was withdrawn, a trial of immunomodulators has begun recruiting in China, one trial has shifted to the completed studies table, and links to presentations/publications describing results…

  • There are ten updates this month: a newly entered therapeutic HIV vaccine trial in China, a new observational study in Belgium, one observational study shifted to the completed studies table, and links added to presented/published results for seven of the studies in the listing. The therapeutic HIV vaccine trial is testing a novel DNA construct…

  • The past month has seen relatively few updates for TAG’s HIV cure-related clinical research listing. One new observational study was entered into the clinicaltrials.gov registry, two trials have been completed or ended, an ongoing investigation of the anti-CMV drug letermovir has reopened for enrollment after a pre-planned pause, and a social science assessment of factors…

  • In the aftermath of the 22nd International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2018), which took place in Amsterdam in July, there has been some reflecting on the challenges facing the HIV cure research field. The presentations that garnered the most news coverage described disappointing study results, but there were also nuggets of novelty and encouragement to be…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • This week in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, two independent studies describe results obtained by blocking type 1 interferon signaling pathways in humanized mouse models of chronic HIV infection. The papers are both open access (see Anjie Zhen et al and Liang Cheng et al). Type 1 interferons are cytokines that interact with specific receptors…

  • A new open access paper from the laboratory of Warner Greene at the Gladstone Institutes was published online yesterday in the journal Cell Reports, accompanied by a poorly conceived press release that prompted some of the most egregiously inaccurate media headlines about HIV research in recent history.  The study, led by Nicole Galloway and Gilad…

  • Several recent papers offer perspectives on the possibility of achieving post-treatment control of HIV replication by starting antiretroviral therapy (ART) during acute infection. Interest in this topic has been sharpened by reports about the VISCONTI cohort, a group of individuals in France who all started ART soon after HIV acquisition, maintained treatment for several years,…

  • Research has documented that HIV infection is associated with significantly increased scarring damage to lymphoid tissue, termed fibrosis. Fibrosis can be quantified by measuring the deposition of collagen, and the amount of lymphoid tissue fibrosis in HIV-positive people has been shown to correlate directly with CD4 T cell depletion. A paper published toward the end…