Recent Research News Roundup: HIV and Other Infectious Diseases

NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has recently shared news about a number of developments of interest to HIV.gov followers. Read this roundup.

NIH Releases Mpox Research Agenda

As part of the U.S. government’s response to the current mpox outbreak, NIAID released an update on its priorities for mpox research.

Study Links Certain Vaginal Bacteria and Inflammatory Marker to Increased Odds of Acquiring HIV Among Cisgender Women

Fourteen vaginal bacterial species and the presence of a protein that promotes inflammation were associated with increased odds of HIV acquisition in a study of more than 500 cisgender women in African countries with high HIV incidence. The study was the largest to date to prospectively analyze the relationship between both the vaginal microbiome and vaginal tissue inflammation and the likelihood of acquiring HIV among cisgender women in this population. Read NIAID’s news release.

SARS-CoV-2 Rapidly Evolves in People with Advanced HIV

A NIAID study revealed how some variants of SARS-CoV-2—the virus that causes COVID-19—could evolve. The researchers used cutting-edge technology to examine genes from SARS-CoV-2 in people with and without HIV who also had COVID-19, looking at the different copies of the virus in individuals over time. They found that people with advanced HIV—as defined by reduced numbers of immune cells called CD4+ T cells—had dozens of SARS-CoV-2 variants in their bodies, compared to just one major variant in most people without HIV and people with HIV who had higher numbers of CD4+ T cells. Read NIAID’s news release about the study.

Emergency Department Screening More Than Doubles Detection of Syphilis Cases

Providing optional syphilis tests to most people seeking care at a large emergency department led to a dramatic increase in syphilis screening and diagnosis, according to an NIH-supported study of nearly 300,000 emergency department encounters in Chicago. Most people diagnosed had no symptoms, which suggests that symptom-based testing strategies alone could miss opportunities to diagnose and treat people with syphilis. The results were published today in the journal Open Forum Infectious Diseases. Read about the NIH-supported study that shows the strategy's potential to reach people with and without symptoms.

Watch HIV.gov’s interview with Dr. Kimberly Stanford, the study’s author, from this year’s Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections.

NIH Awards Will Support Innovation in Syphilis Diagnostics

NIAID has awarded grants for 10 projects to improve diagnostic tools for congenital and adult syphilis—conditions currently diagnosed with a sequence of tests, each with limited precision. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that adult and congenital syphilis cases increased by 80% and 183%, respectively, between 2018 and 2022—a crisis that prompted the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to establish a national taskforce to respond to the epidemic. Read the announcement.

Bringing HIV Study Protocols to Life with Representative, High-Quality Research

The HIV clinical trials network sites have made tremendous contributions to NIH’s scientific priorities by offering direct access to and consultation with populations most affected by HIV globally, and by delivering high-quality clinical research with strong connections to trusted community outreach platforms. Future networks will need to maintain core strengths of current models while expanding capacity in areas vital to further scientific progress. These include operations that inform pandemic responses and extending our reach within communities impacted by HIV, including populations historically underrepresented in clinical research. Read more about the future of NIAID’s HIV clinical research enterprise.