Research at Kaiser Permanente Southern California shows that some types of HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) therapy may have a better cardiovascular risk profile than others. As reported in JAMA Network Open, use of tenofovir alafenamide fumarate (TAF) for HIV PrEP was linked to increased risk for high blood pressure and…

Research conducted by the University of North Carolina (UNC) School of Medicine, has revealed that the gut microbiome can have a significant impact on the acquisition of Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) and human immunodeficiency virus-1 (HIV) infections as well as on the course of the disease. Reporting in Nature Biotechnology, scientists…

Researchers at Pennsylvania State University have developed a fast and efficient test to measure viral load in patients with HIV. For patients with HIV, viral load testing is important to try and understand how they are responding to their medication and whether the infection is progressing. Normally this testing is…

Researchers from Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, Scripps Research, and The International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) report that the Phase I IAVA G001 clinical trial to test the safety and immune response of a self-assembling nanoparticle HIV vaccine has exhibited a strong T-cell response in human subjects. The data from the…

A woman of mixed race has potentially been cured of HIV after receiving virus-resistant stem cells from umbilical cord blood, researchers report. The middle-aged New York patient received the stem cell transplant for acute leukemia and subsequently became resistant to HIV strains. No virus could be detected even after she…

A new study led by researchers at The Wistar Institute, and published in the journal Nature Communications, reports the development of a unique native-like trimer (NLT) conformation of the HIV envelope that can generate neutralizing antibodies against difficult to neutralize HIV (tier-2) strains in mice. The study is a promising…

A research team headed by scientists at the University of Oxford’s Big Data Institute has discovered a new, highly virulent HIV strain that causes rapid T cell decline that has been circulating in the Netherlands for the last few decades. As the ongoing coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated, new mutations in…

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and Moderna, co-developer of an experimental mRNA HIV vaccine, report that it has shown promising results in mice and non-human primates, according to research published in Nature Medicine. The novel vaccine was safe and prompted desired antibody and cellular immune responses against…

To much of the world, the growing realization that vaccine-induced immunity for COVID-19 eventually fades has come as a shock. But for those of us who lived through the beginnings of the world’s last great pandemic, HIV/AIDS, the tremors feel oddly familiar. With AIDS, we never succeeded in developing an…

A global, multi-disciplinary initiative is trying a completely new strategy for curing HIV. The group, known as the HIV Obstruction by Programmed Epigenetics (HOPE) Collaboratory, will be led by researchers at Gladstone Institutes, Scripps Research Florida, and Weill Cornell Medicine. Their approach, which aims to both silence and permanently remove…

Research led by the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia has identified blood biomarkers that can predict if a patient with HIV will go into remission or not after antiretroviral therapy is stopped. The quality of treatment for HIV is now so good that many infected individuals live a long life, but…

A new preclinical model by scientists at Weill Cornell Medicine and Children’s National Hospital allows for the study of long-term HIV infection and the testing of new therapies aimed at curing the disease. HIV is a human-specific pathogen that does not cause disease in other species, although it can replicate…

By using a technique known as DNA origami to fold DNA into a virus-like structure, MIT researchers have designed HIV-like particles coated with HIV antigens in precise patterns, which may eventually be used as an HIV vaccine. In vitro studies showed that the DNA origami particles, which mimic the size…

Vela Diagnostics has received FDA authorization to market its in vitro diagnostic test for detection of HIV-1 genomic drug resistance mutations (DRMs). The Sentosa SQ HIV-1 Genotyping Assay uses the plasma of patients infected with human immunodeficiency virus-1 (HIV-1)to detect HIV-1 Group M DRMs in the protease, reverse transcriptase, and integrase regions of…

Scientists at the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), an affiliate of City of Hope, report the development of LumosVar, a computer program that can help identify cancer-causing mutations from patient tumor samples. The study (“Leveraging Spatial Variation in Tumor Purity for Improved Somatic Variant Calling of Archival Tumor Only Samples”) appears in Frontiers in Oncology.…