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Investigators from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard have added another piece to the puzzle of how a small group of individuals known as elite controllers are able to control HIV infection without drug treatment. In their paper published in the open-access journal PLOS Pathogens, the research team […]

Investigators from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard have learned more about one way the immune systems of elite controllers – those rare individuals able to control HIV infection without drug treatment – block a key step in the virus’s life cycle. In a paper appearing in Cell […]

“Three decades into the HIV/AIDS epidemic, what is your assessment of where we stand?    We’ve learned an extraordinary amount about how this virus causes disease and why it’s been so difficult to make a vaccine. It’s an infection of the immune system so it cripples a person’s normal response to infection. It alters itself […]

“During my residency at Mass General, patients started coming in with a completely new and scary disease, and every patient we saw died. That shaped my career immensely. I had no plan at all to go into research and I just wanted to be a physician who cared for patients. But then it became so […]

“One day in early 1995 a man named Bob Massie walked into my office at the outpatient clinic of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Massie told me he had been infected with HIV—the virus that causes AIDS—for 16 years and yet had never shown any symptoms. My physical examination confirmed he was healthy, in stark […]

More than 1.8 million people die of HIV-related causes each year—approximately 5,000 deaths per day. HIV is a particularly significant threat in the sub-Saharan region of Africa. In some areas, the occurrence of HIV is eight times higher for women than men; an estimated one in three women seeking care during pregnancy is HIV positive. […]

Scientists using a powerful mathematical tool previously applied to the stock market have identified an Achilles heel in HIV that could be a prime target for AIDS vaccines or drugs.   The research adds weight to a provocative hypothesis—that an HIV vaccine should avoid a broadside attack and instead home in on a few targets. […]

Bruce Walker didn’t want to sit next to Terry Ragon on the 24-hour plane ride from Boston to South Africa. He had only recently met the wealthy, Cambridge, Massachusetts-based software executive and was about to spend two full days touring AIDS-ravaged Durban with him in hope of obtaining a donation. Walker, an immunologist and physician […]