amFAR, the American Foundation for AIDS Research, awarded 1 million dollar to four reseach teams around the world. One of the research teams is lead by Nobel laureate Dr. David Baltimore. His discovery of reverse transcriptase is the cornerstone of HIV treatment today. amFar spends about 60 percent of its research grants to cure-specific projects around the world.

One of the other three projects is run in Belgium. The University Hospital of Ghent is receiving 249600 dollar of fundings from amFAR.  The research, led by Linos Vanderkerckhove, will search for new tools to measure decreases in levels of virus that are already at the limit of detection with the most sensitive test available today. His test will simultaneously indicate the size of the latent reservoir of HIV, the extent to which virus continues to replicate while the patient is on antiretroviral therapy and the precise stretches of DNA into which the virus inserts itself.

We are witnessing an exponential growth in our understanding of the obstacles standing in the way of a cure. Several of these projects wouldn’t have been possible even a year ago. Thanks to organizations like amfAR, given the right resources and the political will, a cure for HIV/AIDS can potentially be found any day now.