When AIDS first emerged more than 30 years ago, it was considered a death sentence. More than 600,000 people have died of AIDS since the epidemic began. Today, there are more than one million living with HIV in the United States. Now, the HIV/AIDS community is talking about a realistic cure for the disease – one based on stem cell science. On this blog, we’ve written about how our grantees are progressing toward treatment for HIV/AIDS, but we wanted to pull the best of those posts into one place. Here are some of the most interesting posts if you want to learn more about HIV/AIDS and research by CIRM grantees.

1. Hopes for an HIV cure: familiar faces talking about a new goal
2. Thinking the unthinkable, and saying it out loud: curing HIV 
3. Clinical trial testing innovative HIV/AIDS stem cell therapy gets under way 
4. New Video: Calimmune Begins CIRM-Funded Stem Cell-Based HIV/AIDS Clinical Trial 
5. CIRM board member Jeff Sheehy honored for World AIDS Day 
6. Minnesota boy receives transplant that could treat both leukemia and HIV infection
7. CIRM HIV/AIDS disease team making news
8. HIV/AIDS advocate Jeff Sheehy reappointed to CIRM’s governing board 

For a complete list of HIV/AIDS research we’ve funded and more information about our projects, see the HIV/AIDS fact sheet on our website.

We also produced this video with our board member Jeff Sheehy describing the work of one of our HIV/AIDS teams.

Rina Shaikh-Lekso