In the larger picture, the fight against HIV has been a triumph of modern medicine. A patient diagnosed with HIV in the 1980s had a remaining life expectancy of 1 to 2 years. In 2023, they can expect to live another half century. But so far, an HIV vaccine has remained elusive. In the newest phase III failure, Janssen Pharmaceutical Cos. of Johnson and Johnson closed down its Mosaico trial more than a year ahead of schedule, following a data and safety monitoring board’s (DSMB) report saying the study was not expected to hit its primary endpoint.

Anthony Fauci has retired from his position as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and as chief medical advisor to the U.S. president. But Fauci, who has advised every president since Ronald Reagan, continues to share his encyclopedic knowledge with the HIV research community, as he has since the beginning of the HIV pandemic. Fauci co-founded the first National Conference on Human Retroviruses and related infections in 1993. At the Opening Session of the 30th edition of the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI), he highlighted the advances that have collectively extended the life expectancy of newly diagnosed patients by decades.

Fifteen years ago, at the 2008 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI), researchers announced that they had cured a patient – Timothy Ray Brown, initially known only as the Berlin Patient to preserve his privacy – of HIV through a hematopoietic stem cell transplant. Now, as researchers are gathered in Seattle for CROI 2023, reports of another cured patient were published Feb. 20, 2023, in Nature Medicine. Ten years after receiving a hematopoietic stem cell transplant, and 4 years after stopping antiretroviral treatment (ART), a 53-year-old patient may have been cured of HIV infection.

A multiomic analysis of the HIV reservoir has characterized the phenotypic and epigenetic heterogenicity of the virus-infected memory CD4+ T-cell population in people living with HIV taking antiretroviral therapy (ART-PLWH). This is the step towards an ex vivo single-cell atlas for these cells, which could help to design new strategies to eliminate the reservoir.

Ice, juice, the exact measure of liquor, a few drops of Angostura... What goes into a good New Year’s Eve cocktail? According to researchers working on vaccines for the most elusive viruses, it will be time soon to toast next-generation vaccines. If 2020 was the year of the COVID-19 pandemic, and in 2021 the year of mRNA vaccinations, 2022 brought polyvalent designs of antigens, evaluated highly neutralizing antibodies, and fine-tuned mRNA technology against SARS-CoV-2, HIV and the flu.

Researchers have discovered biphenyl-substituted pyridine derivatives of doravirine to be developed as novel HIV therapeutics.

A new vaccine that uses the native-like HIV-1 envelope (Env) trimer CH505 and a Toll-like receptor (TLR) 7/8 agonist adjuvant, successfully evaluated in macaques, generated potent polyclonal neutralizing antibodies (nAbs) and a high protection against the infection of the homologous simian-human immunodeficiency virus (SHIV).