Although today’s antiretroviral therapy enables people with HIV to live longer and healthier lives because it can reduce the viral load to undetectable levels, ART cannot eliminate the latent viral reservoir and cure the disease. But Australian researchers made a breakthrough in HIV cure research: This one did not involve a bone marrow transplant, but used the same mRNA technology that allowed us to end the COVID-19 pandemic.
The team at the Doherty Institute, in Melbourne, packaged mRNA into lipid nanoparticles to deliver encoding proteins that revealed the dormant virus (Nat Commun 2025;16[1]:4979). If researchers can get to that reservoir, they have a better shot at eliminating HIV and seeing the end to the HIV pandemic.
Researchers in the United States also are looking at mRNA vaccines for HIV, but that research is in jeopardy because Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. doesn’t trust mRNA technology. He has repeatedly called COVID-19 vaccines dangerous and ineffective, and claims they were not tested (youtube.com/watch?v=MvBGWNI84j0).
While the Australian researchers were being heralded for their findings, U.S. funding for three studies looking at mRNA to create an HIV vaccine—studies that were already well underway—were canceled. (See our cover story, page 6).
For more than 40 years, U.S. researchers have been at the forefront of HIV research. They have not only increased our understanding of this disease, but also our understanding of the immune system. They have helped develop therapies and have been working on a vaccine. All of this research also has benefited other fields, especially autoimmune diseases and cancer.
Today HIV research is at a crossroads, but defunding will ensure that it is not the Americans who will travel down the road to a cure.
John F. Kennedy saw this in 1963. Before we even had heard of HIV, his message to Congress about why we should continue to fund innovative health research still holds true today: “This Nation has made impressive strides in its search for knowledge to combat disease and, as a result of a deliberate national effort, a bold and far-reaching program is moving well.
“But this effort is unending—new breakthroughs lie ahead—major problems are unsolved. This country must invest in a further expansion of essential and high-quality research and related activities,” he said.
The views expressed here belong to the editor and do not necessarily reflect those of the publisher.
This article is from the June 2025 print issue.