UCLA Leads the Way
From the earliest days of the AIDS pandemic, UCLA has been at the forefront of HIV research.
UCLA researchers were the first to:
- Describe why early AIDS drugs failed
- Report a case of HIV transmission through breast milk-in patient Ariel Glaser, daughter of Paul and Elizabeth Glaser
- Demonstrate clearance of HIV from an infected infant
- Identify, clone, and characterize HIV in the brain
- Discover that some individuals are wholly or partially resistant to HIV infection
- Report the epidemic of HIV infection among plasma donors in China
- Show that the adult thymus can help rebuild an HIV-ravaged immune system
- Develop an animal model for HIV, thereby enabling scientists to test new drug therapies.
- Demonstrate the clinical activity of AZT (zidovudine) in HIV-positive patients
- Devise treatments for patients who don't respond to standard multidrug HIV therapy
- Reduce mother-to-child transmission rates by pioneering the use of the drug AZT in HIV-positive pregnant women
- Demonstrate the feasibility of stem-cell gene therapy in HIV
Major accomplishments at UCLA in the last five years:
- First to conduct Phase 2 anti-HIV autologous stem cell gene therapy trial in adults which has shown that cell-delivered gene transfer has the potential to be a once-only treatment that reduces viral load, preserves the immune system and avoids lifelong antiretroviral therapy.
- First to establish an in vitro model for HIV latency in primary cells
- First to generate T cells from human embryonic stem cells
- Among the first to develop a novel animal model with a humanized immune system to study HIV infection
- Among the first to show rectal microbicide efficacy in non-human primates
- Among the first to show the gut mucosa is highly vulnerable to HIV infection
- First to indicate that African American men who have sex with men and are HIV positive report a one in four likelihood that they experienced sexual abuse before age 18