Curing HIV: Moving Forward Faster

As the scientific community’s interest in finding a cure for HIV grows, researchers should continue to pursue multiple avenues of investigation, write amfAR’s Rowena Johnston, Ph.D., and Marcella Flores, Ph.D., in a special issue of the journal AIDS Research and Human Retroviruses.

Published in February, the issue focuses on progress toward an HIV cure and features a collection of articles describing the broad scope and current status of finding a cure for the nearly 37 million people living with HIV/AIDS.

Since the first case of a cure was reported in the “Berlin patient” in 2008, HIV cure research has gained enormous traction, with many researchers exploring various innovative approaches, from pharmacological to immunological to gene therapy.

In Curing HIV: Moving Forward Faster, the authors endeavor to answer critical questions such as “Is a functional cure, or remission, good enough?” and “Is precise measurement of the reservoir necessary or sufficient to evaluate an intervention?” They suggest that while efforts to control the virus in the absence of antiretroviral therapy for a long time (a “functional cure” or “remission”) may be a more achievable outcome for people with HIV, efforts to eliminate the virus entirely (a “sterilizing” cure) should continue to be explored.