Through the rhetorical din of the April 8 Rally for Research (see blog), a couple of statistics—shared by Rockefeller University President Marc Tessier-Lavigne—sounded like a tocsin: Annual health-care costs have climbed to reach more than US$8,600 per person over the past decade. But the government’s annual investments in the US National Institutes of Health have hovered at a paltry $100 per person—about 80 times less.  

Megan Kane never thought her first post-doc assignment would be a temporary job in science communications.

The Virginia resident, who graduated from Johns Hopkins recently with a Ph.D. in human genetics, had hoped to land a job with an academic or government lab focused on HIV/AIDS. She has a particular interest in long-term nonprogressors—HIV-infected individuals who are able to control HIV for up to a decade or more without ever taking ARVs. 

When talk turns to the kind of neutralizing antibodies that can prevent HIV infection, it always revolves around one and just one HIV protein: the Envelope (Env) protein that forms the viral spike. That’s because Env is thought to be the only protein HIV carries on its surface, exposed to antibody targeting. 

A few days ago, French researchers published a study showing that some patients who start antiretroviral therapy (ART) early, during acute infection, seem to be able to control HIV after stopping therapy, suggesting that they may be functionally cured (PLoS Pathog. 9, e1003211). But there's a lot more to this story--and IAVI Report covered it all last year. If you'd like to know more about this study, its context and the ongoing debate about how soon ART should be started, check out the article in the September-October issue of our magazine.

You’d think scientists would know all there is to know about the biological effects of a substance that has been used for decades to make vaccines. Well, think again. For one thing, they still haven’t figured out how exactly the humble adjuvant alum works—and this concoction of insoluble aluminum salts has been used for more than 80 years to boost the efficacy of childhood immunizations. And for most of that period, it has been the only adjuvant used in human vaccines.