I attend a lot of scientific meetings. At the end of most, I ask participants what they thought were the highlights. But at this year’s 7th International AIDS Society conference on HIV Pathogenesis, Treatment and Prevention, held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, from June 30th to July 3rd, I didn’t need to ask. The thing that had everybody excited was the announcement that researchers might have replicated the HIV cure achieved in Timothy Brown—the so-called Berlin patient. 

The eradication of viral reservoirs remains among the most challenging obstacles to curing HIV infection, a problem that researchers have sought to solve by inducing HIV replication in latently infected, resting CD4+ T cells. The expectation is that the cells would then either die as a result of the renewed viral replication or become vulnerable to targeting by antiretroviral drugs or immune responses. 

Most people assume, perhaps understandably, that HIV-infected injecting drug users (IDUs) are incapable of adhering to the daily grind of oral antiretroviral (ARV) treatment. Yet this assumption appears to be contradicted by the data. More than three dozen studies have shown IDUs are just as compliant as any other high-risk group in taking their antiviral pills every day. 

Today was the last day of the first conference on vaccine design organized by Cold Spring Harbor (CSH) Asia, the Asian branch of the renowned Cold Spring Harbor conference in the state of New York. The gathering took place from June 3 to 7 at a brand new conference center and hotel built in 2010 in Suzhou, just one hour by car (half an hour by the recently constructed high speed train) from Shanghai. The center was built for CSH Asia to hold such meetings, said Maoyen Chi, who directs the CSH Asia program. So far, CSH Asia has held almost 40 meetings here, covering many areas of biology.

Check out our latest issue of VAX, which features articles on gene therapy research, results of a therapeutic vaccine trial and our most recent Primer.