PARIS – The development of immunotherapy that can cure at least a fraction of formerly deadly cancers has been the greatest medical triumph of recent years. At this week's meeting of the International AIDS Society, multiple presentations discussed the possibilities and practicalities of using the same approach to cure chronic viral infections.

PARIS – Genentech Inc.'s Dan Chen has described the advent of checkpoint blockers as "cancer's penicillin moment," when a drug came along that was not itself able to cure everything, but that signaled the onset of an era where a whole class of diseases, for a time, went from often deadly to mostly harmless.

PARIS – A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. And in that spirit, the newest research on a wide variety of prevention strategies other than vaccination are being presented at the meeting of the International AIDS Society (IAS) this week, despite the conviction that a vaccine will ultimately be necessary to end the HIV pandemic.

PARIS – At the International AIDS Society's 2017 meeting on HIV science, data from the APPROACH vaccine trial that were presented in Monday's symposium on translational vaccinology were the most salient example of why there is what National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci termed "a very cautious optimism" that despite decades of unsuccessful attempts, a vaccine is ultimately possible.

Treating animals with a drug that inhibited the cellular integrated stress response could reverse memory deficits caused by traumatic brain injury (TBI), even if treatment was delayed for several weeks after the injury.

Fanconi anemia is a genetic disorder that leads to bone marrow failure, and also predisposes individuals to developing certain types of cancer. Fanconi anemia is caused by mutations in DNA repair genes, though it does not map neatly onto a particular DNA repair pathway.