HIV cure study volunteering: I’ve gone back for more

Tim Murphy described his second trip to the Ragon Institute to volunteer for HIV cure research.

“There’s a special kind of HIV cure research going on at the Ragon Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Scientists there are collecting blood samples from folks who’ve been on HIV treatment for 15 years or longer. They’ll analyze the samples to determine if these folks are good candidates to do an HIV treatment interruption study with a lofty goal: to see if, by this point, people’s own immune systems have developed the ability to control HIV without meds.

If that happens, and if researchers can then figure out why these folks control naturally, they hope to funnel that knowledge into a kind of therapeutic vaccine that could one day replace lifetime meds as a way to keep HIV tamped down in people whose immune systems still can’t fight HIV off on their own.

Ragon researchers are trying to see how many folks on HIV meds have HIV in their body that lives in so-called ‘gene deserts.’ In those areas, even if this HIV is functional, it’s far removed from cells that it can infect. If we could just get the body to confine HIV to these deserts—so goes the theory, which is called “block and lock”—then it wouldn’t be an issue anymore, and we wouldn’t need meds.”

Read the full story at TheBody.