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: Treatment
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Two recent case reports of temporary HIV remission, first presented at this year’s CROI and IAS conferences, have now been published in the open access journal PLoS Medicine. Tim Henrich and colleagues from UCSF report on an adult male diagnosed with HIV and started on ART unusually early, due to acquiring the infection during a…
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Strategies for dealing with the reservoir of latent HIV that persists despite antiretroviral therapy (ART) have primarily focused on awakening the virus from its dormant state. But Susana Valente and colleagues from the Scripps Research Institute in Florida are taking a different tack, flipping the idea of latency reversal on its head. Their approach—which they…
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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…
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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…
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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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A paper published yesterday in Nature has stirred considerable excitement and widespread media coverage. Led by the laboratory of Michael Farzan at The Scripps Research Institute, the research involves a newly designed inhibitor of HIV named eCD4-Ig. The inhibitor is designed to bind the HIV envelope at sites that attach to CD4 and CCR5 molecules…
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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…
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On November 3rd, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) announced the launch of the IMPAACT P1115 trial, which will investigate very early initiation of HIV treatment in newborns. Much of the impetus for the trial came from the Mississippi…
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Initial results from the Canadian pediatric HIV research mentioned in a recent blog post were published in Clinical Infectious Diseases on June 9th. The paper notes that Canada’s three pediatric HIV care institutions have a longstanding policy of administering triple drug antiretroviral therapy (ART) regimens to newborns considered at a high risk of HIV infection (either…
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An open access paper published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases reports that earlier HIV suppression by ART is associated with significantly smaller HIV reservoirs in perinatally infected youths. The study, by Katherine Luzuriaga and colleagues, was initially presented at CROI last year and compared two groups of four individuals: one group started ART at…