Broadly neutralizing antibodies are one of the most powerful weapons against HIV. And like everything that is effective in the fight against HIV, they are hard to come by.
Barely more than two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, there are five approved vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 available in the U.S. Forty years into the HIV pandemic, there are none. That contrast was repeatedly made by speakers at the 2022 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI).
At the 2022 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI), investigators reported on a fourth patient who has achieved HIV remission after a stem cell transplant. The patient is the first woman and the first mixed-race person to achieve HIV remission through a transplant procedure. In 2017, she was transplanted with cord blood stem cells lacking a functional CCR5 receptor, which prevents HIV from entering cells.
It's neither a retrovirus nor an opportunistic infection. But of course, SARS-CoV-2 has a prominent place at the table at the 2022 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) –
starting with the fact that COVID-19 has again forced the conference to go virtual.
Curing HIV remains a dream for now, but it is clearly not a pipe dream. One of the challenges for developing a vaccine is that there is no natural immune response to model such a vaccine on. Over time, an untreated HIV infection will almost certainly kill its host. However, there is a group of elite controllers – people who, although they cannot eliminate the virus, manage to keep it in check.
In 2020, the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) was the first medical conference to go virtual, with two days advance warning, when news of infections resulting from a Biogen Inc. conference with about 150 attendees made it abundantly clear that SARS-CoV-2 was circulating, well, probably everywhere.
Like Berlin patient Timothy Ray Brown before him, London patient Adam Castillejo, whose case was top story of the 2019 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI), energized the HIV cure research field by his sheer existence. Curing HIV, Pablo Tebas told the audience at a themed discussion on curative strategies, “has been considered [for] a long time the holy grail.”
CYBERSPACE – Continuing improvements in HIV treatment and progress toward a cure notwithstanding, an effective vaccine will be necessary to gain the upper hand in the decades-long fight against the pandemic.
With Friday’s last-minute decision to move to an all-virtual format, the opening session of the 2020 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) was certainly an unusual one. “We are in uncharted waters,” conference co-chair Sharon Hillier, Richard Sweet Professor of Reproductive Infectious Disease at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, told the audience via livestream.
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