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: Pathogenesis
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The 2019 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) took place in Seattle from March 3rd-7th. The major news on the cure research front was the possibility of two additional cases similar to Timothy Ray Brown, who for the past 12 years has been the only individual considered cured of HIV infection (TAG issued a…
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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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A paper published earlier this month in Nature Medicine by Jake Estes and colleagues addresses the difficult challenge of attempting to define the distribution and total size of the persistent HIV reservoir. The researchers employed a variety of tests to measure viral RNA and DNA—including new imaging techniques they have developed named RNAscope and DNAscope—in multiple…
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The rarity of CD4 T cells containing latent HIV in people on antiretroviral therapy—the typical estimate is around one per million CD4 T cells—makes them extremely challenging both to study and target with therapies. A paper published online yesterday in Nature represents a possible breakthrough in this area, reporting that it may be possible to identify many…
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For many years scientists have probed the question of whether combination antiretroviral therapy (ART) completely inhibits all HIV replication in the body. The preponderance of evidence has suggested that it does, and opinion has generally tilted toward the idea that persistent virus replication in the face of ART is relatively uncommon. The evidence includes studies…
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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…
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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,…
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Several presentations at last year’s CROI offered evidence that the proliferation and persistence of latently infected CD4 T cells is associated with HIV integration into certain genes that have also been implicated in the development of cancers. The results prompted the investigators to hypothesize that HIV integration into cancer-associated genes plays a causative role in…
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On January 28th, a paper reporting evidence of rapid progression associated with a recently identified HIV-1 recombinant circulating in Cuba (CRF19_cpx) was published online by the journal EBioMedicine. CRF stands for circulating recombinant form, and CRF19_cpx represents a combination of HIV-1 subtypes A, D and G. Last week, the authors issued a press release about the study, and…
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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…