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
-
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…
-
The 21st Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI 2014) opened in Boston on Monday and concludes today. The media is awash with stories relating to a conference presentation by Deborah Persaud from Johns Hopkins University, in which she described the case of an HIV-infected baby who was treated within four hours of birth and…
-
A subset of HIV-positive people who initiate antiretroviral therapy (ART) and achieve suppression of HIV replication experience poor recovery of CD4 T cell numbers. Terms used to describe this subset of individuals include “discordant responders” and “immunological non-responders” (INRs). As yet, there is no universally accepted definition of INRs and a variety of CD4 T…
-
At the IAS conference last July, Victor Garcia described results obtained in the humanized mouse model with a strategy that targets HIV-infected cells for elimination. The study was published in PLoS Pathogens last week, drawing considerable media coverage. The strategy involves the use of an “immunotoxin” – a combination of an antibody fragment that recognizes a…
-
Two new papers describing a recently discovered mechanism of CD4 T cell death in HIV infection are receiving extensive press coverage. Both are from the laboratory of Warner Greene at the Gladstone Institutes, and follow up on their prior work published in the journal Cell in 2010. The papers have simultaneously appeared in two high profile journals,…
-
HIV is notoriously stubborn in its ability to thwart attacks by antibodies. The sugary outer envelope of the virus is so effective in cloaking its vulnerabilities that, for many years, the number of antibodies known to have broad neutralizing activity against HIV could be counted on one hand. But recently, collaborative research efforts aiming to…
-
In April, doctors at the University of Minnesota announced that they were attempting to reproduce the cure achieved in Timothy Brown in a 12-year old boy with HIV and leukemia who required a stem cell transplant. Due to the challenges associated with identifying appropriate adult stem cell donors homozygous for CCR5Δ32 (as was done for Brown), the…
-
The April issue of Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics features an excellent open access review by Thomas Rasmussen and colleagues describing approaches to eliminating HIV reservoirs that are advancing into clinical trials. Prominently featured are histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitors, which have emerged as lead candidates for liberating latent HIV from cellular lockdown. The paper offers detailed…
-
Over the years, a number of small studies have been published suggesting that there might be benefits associated with probiotic and/or prebiotic supplementation in people with HIV infection. Probiotics typically comprise live microbes that play a key role in maintaining gut health—commonly known as “good bacteria”—while prebiotics are food ingredients intended to stimulate the expansion…
-
On Monday March 4 at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) in Atlanta, details were presented on a case of a potential “functional cure” of HIV infection in an infant. The story has already broken widely in the media due to a CROI press conference held on Sunday afternoon, during which the researcher…