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: Vaccines
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The 2015 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) took place in Seattle from February 23rd to the 26th. The major news that emerged from the meeting was the extremely high degree of protection from HIV infection obtained with pre-exposure prophylaxis in two studies, PROUD and IPERGAY. On the vaccine and cure fronts nothing was…
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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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One of the less-discussed factors that influences susceptibility to HIV infection is immune activation, which is interlinked with the availability of potential target cells for the virus. Several recent papers and a poster presentation at CROI 2014 shed additional light on this topic. In an open access review published in Retrovirology last November, Catherine Card and…
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Over the past few years there has been growing interest in the use of adeno-associated virus (AAV) as a vehicle for generating anti-HIV neutralizing antibodies in humans. The approach is different from traditional vaccination, in that AAV is used essentially as a gene therapy: the AAV vector is designed to take up residence in cells…
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Following up on the prior post about broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs) against HIV, there is now a free database available (http://bnaber.org) that offers detailed information on all known bNAbs. The genesis and purpose of the database is described in an open access paper in the journal Nucleic Acids Research. Although not a focus of the paper,…
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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…
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A study published on September 12th by the journal Immunity ties together two emerging areas of HIV vaccine research. In recent years, scientists have discovered that a small proportion of chronically infected individuals develop antibody responses capable of broadly neutralizing a diverse array HIV isolates. These antibody responses typically take years to develop, and are…
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Vaccine vectors based on adenoviruses—which are common in nature and cause severe colds—were once viewed as promising for HIV and other intractable diseases due to their ability to induce antigen-specific CD8 T cell responses in the majority of recipients. The subsequent Icarus-like trajectory of the approach in HIV has been covered in some detail on…
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It’s well documented that T-cell immune responses targeting HIV can cause selection of viral variants that evade recognition (immune escape). But some studies have reported that, surprisingly, HIV variability in regions targeted by T cells is lower compared to other locations in the genome, a phenomenon not seen with other RNA viruses. In a paper…
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In recent years, new technologies have facilitated the discovery of an expanding number of antibodies capable of neutralizing a broad array of primary HIV isolates from different clades. As covered previously on the blog, these broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs) have been fished from the plasma of individuals with chronic HIV infection and, in most cases, do…