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New research from Oregon Health & Science University is helping explain why at least five people have become HIV-free after receiving a stem cell transplant. The study’s insights may bring scientists closer to developing what they hope will become a widespread cure for the virus that causes AIDS, which has infected about 38 million people …
Haematopoietic stem cell transplantation for the treatment of severe blood cancers is the only medical intervention that has cured two people living with HIV in the past. An international group of physicians and researchers from Germany, the Netherlands, France, Spain, and the United States has now identified another case in which HIV infection has been …
Cow mucus provides the basis for a synthetic prophylactic gel developed at KTH Royal Institute of Technology to protect against HIV and herpes transmission. The lubricating gel proved 70 percent effective in lab tests against HIV, and 80 percent effective against herpes. The viral prophylactic tests were conducted in a lab on several types of …
Researchers from Tel Aviv University demonstrated the success of a novel technology that may be developed into a one-time vaccine to treat people with HIV and AIDS. The team used CRISP systems, best known as a gene-editing technique, to engineer type B white blood cells that activate the immune system to produce HIV-neutralizing antibodies. The …
Thanks to antiretroviral therapy, HIV infection is no longer the life sentence it once was. But despite the effectiveness of drugs to manage and treat the virus, it can never be fully eliminated from the human body, lingering in some cells deep in different human tissues where it goes unnoticed by the immune system. Now, …
A woman from New York became the third person ever to be cured of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS after she received a stem-cell transplant that used cells from umbilical cord blood, scientists reported Tuesday (Feb. 15). The two other people cured of HIV, Timothy Brown and Adam Castillejo, both received bone marrow transplants …
As the ongoing coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated, new mutations in viral genetic sequences can have significant impacts on the virus’s transmissibility and the damage it causes. For many years, there have been concerns that this could arise in the HIV-1 virus, which already affects 38 million people worldwide, and has caused 33 million deaths to …
CD4+ T cells are important parts of the immune system and play a key role in defending the body against pathogens. As they possess a great variety of defense mechanisms against HIV in their resting state, they are infected only very rarely — but these few infected cells form a latent reservoir for HIV in …
Image: Scanning electromicrograph of an HIV-infected H9 T cell. Image Credit: NIAID An experimental HIV vaccine based on mRNA — the same platform technology used in two COVID-19 vaccines — shows promise in mice and non-human primates, according to scientists at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes …
Ragon Member Xu Yu, MD, studies how HIV stores copies of its genome in human cells, resulting in life-long infection. In 2020, she identified an untreated HIV patient with no intact copies of HIV genomes in more than 1.5 billion blood cells analyzed, suggesting the virus had been cleared from the patient’s body. Her team …