AIDS research

HIV/AIDS research includes all medical research that attempts to prevent, treat, or cure HIV/AIDS, as well as fundamental research about the nature of HIV as an infectious agent and AIDS as the disease caused by HIV.

Examples of particular HIV/AIDS research include, drug development, HIV vaccines, pre-exposure prophylaxis, or post-exposure prophylaxis.

A body of scientific evidence has shown that men who are circumcised are less likely to contract HIV than men who are uncircumcized. Research published in 2014, concludes that the sex hormones estrogen and progesterone selectively impact HIV transmission.

"Pre-exposure prophylaxis" refers to the practice of taking some drugs before being exposed to HIV infection, and having a decreased chance of contracting HIV as a result of taking that drug. Post-exposure prophylaxis refers to taking some drugs quickly after being exposed to HIV, while the virus is in a person's body but before the virus has established itself. In both cases, the drugs would be the same as those used to treat persons with HIV, and the intent of taking the drugs would be to eradicate the virus before the person becomes irreversibly infected.

Post-exposure prophylaxis is recommended in anticipated cases of HIV exposure, such as if a nurse somehow has blood-to-blood contact with a patient in the course of work, or if someone without HIV requests the drugs immediately after having unprotected sex with a person who might have HIV. Pre-exposure prophylaxis is sometimes an option for HIV-negative persons who feel that they are at increased risk of HIV infection, such as an HIV-negative person in a serodiscordant relationship with an HIV-positive partner.

Current research in these agents include drug development, efficacy testing, and practice recommendations for using drugs for HIV prevention.

The within-host dynamics of HIV infection include the spread of the virus in vivo, the establishment of latency, the effects of immune response on the virus, etc. Early studies used simple models and only considered the cell-free spreading of HIV, in which virus particles bud from an infected T cell, enter the blood/extracellular fluid, and then infect another T cell. A 2015 study proposes a more realistic model of HIV dynamics that also incorporates the viral cell-to-cell spreading mechanism, where the virus is directly transited from one cell to another, as well as the T cell activation, the cellular immune response, and the immune exhaustion as the infection progresses.

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