How Can We Get to HIV Remission?

At CROI 2017 in Seattle, Washington, Jintanat Anaworanth, MD, PhD, spoke about her work in acute HIV research at the US Military Research Program. Her team has a large cohort of patients who they identify very early and give treatment immediately, so they're measuring the reservoir and what it does to the immune system.

They now have a series of studies that looks at how to get to HIV remission - their near term goal is to control plasma viral load in the blood to undetectable levels without long-term ART. "So what we do is we really try to treat patients early that way we can really reduce the amount of virus in the blood and preserve the immune system," said Anaworanth. They do have other interventions they're looking at like vaccines and antibodies.

Anaworanth continued, "I think people are now understanding more about the virus. In our study, we try to see how we can diagnose people earlier, treat people earlier, and what are the effects of early treatment. I think that awareness is helping [maybe] to get people in earlier. I want to mention, too, in our HIV care studies we do social science studies as well, so we're trying to understand how people feel towards this type of research and to try to engage them better."