A team of researchers from The Wistar Institute and the University of Pennsylvania reports new evidence refuting a popular hypothesis about the highly publicized failure in 2007 of the Merck STEP HIV vaccine study that cast doubt on the feasibility of HIV-1 vaccines. The findings were published on-line July 20 in Nature Medicine.

Rutgers AIDS researchers Gail Ferstandig Arnold and Eddy Arnold may have turned a corner in their search for a HIV vaccine. In a paper just published in the Journal of Virology, the husband and wife duo and their colleagues report on their research progress.

To help develop an effective HIV vaccine, researchers are trying to better understand how the immune systems of a small minority of HIV-infected people known as long-term non-progressors (LTNPs) contain the virus naturally.

The question of whether or not to continue to pursue the development of T-cell-based HIV-1 vaccines has been a source of controversy following last year's widely publicized failure of the field's most promising candidate, a vaccine developed by Merck known as V520.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), is reshaping its research enterprise to broaden HIV vaccine discovery activities.

Advanced BioScience Laboratories, Inc. (ABL) and the University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMMS) report that their unique HIV vaccine formulation was effective in eliciting strong and balanced immune responses in healthy human volunteers. The findings are published in the journal Vaccine (“Cross-subtype antibody and cellular immune responses induced by a polyvalent DNA prime–protein boost HIV-1 vaccine in healthy human volunteers,” Vaccine online, May 22, 2008.

Researchers at The Scripps Research Institute have developed a new two-punch strategy against HIV and they have already successfully tested aspects of it in the laboratory.

A group of Australian researchers at the Universities of Melbourne and New South Wales have developed new tools and paradigms to understand immune evasion from HIV. The study, published Friday, January 25 in PLoS Pathogens, shows that both prior vaccination and timing influence the rates of immune escape, providing further insight into the effectiveness of T cell immunity to HIV.

UCLA researchers have found that a key protein in the body's dendritic cells can stop the virus that causes AIDS from "budding" — part of the virus' life cycle that is crucial to its ability to replicate and infect other cells.

The search for a vaccination against HIV has been in progress since 1984, with very little success. Traditional methods used for identifying potential cellular targets can be very costly and time-consuming. The key to creating a vaccination lies in knowing which parts of the pathogen to target with which antibodies.

By furthering scientists’ understanding of the molecular mechanisms that separate the minority of successful HIV antibodies from the majority of ineffective antibodies, the work may have implications for future attempts to design an HIV vaccine.

Researchers from Rome, Italy, describe a finding in the August 2007 print issue of The FASEB Journal that could lead to new drugs to fight the HIV/AIDS virus, as well as new vaccines to prevent infection. It has been known that HIV proteins disable the antibody-forming part of the immune system (the “homeland defense” or acquired immune system).