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Though a scalable HIV cure remains elusive, research featured at this year’s Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) brought us some important steps forward. Many of these came via an oral abstract session, an event that is typically reserved for the hottest findings presented at the meeting. This year’s CROI cure session offered new insights into the HIV reservoir, how to awaken it, and how to prime the immune system to attack it.

The term “inflammaging” captures a reality that clinicians caring for people with HIV increasingly recognize: Chronic inflammation and accelerated immune aging are reshaping the long-term health picture for their patients, even those with durable viral suppression.

For clinicians who care for people living with HIV, it is important to be as aware of their patients’ cognitive health as their liver or bone health, says Alan Winston, M.D., FRCP. And doing so need not be a burden: Screening for cognitive symptoms can consist of a simple question about memory that takes a few seconds to ask. TheBodyPro sat down with Winston after his symposium presentation at the recent Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI 2026).

For HIV-treating clinicians of a certain age, the term “lipodystrophy” probably conjures a complex mish-mash of memories: atypically large abdomens and necks; atypically thin limbs, buttocks, and faces; and a significant amount of frustration and confusion among patients during a time when antiretroviral therapy was otherwise working immunological miracles. In some very significant ways, we are treating a very different HIV epidemic these days than we were back then.

If you’re a clinician treating people with HIV, it can already feel like you have a massive list of comorbidities among your patients that you need to help prevent, screen for, and treat (or refer for treatment). It can also feel like you need to pay attention to these complications earlier in the lives of your patients living with HIV than your patients who are not, even when their viral load is well-controlled.

Subscription-based pricing in pharmaceutical treatment—often referred to as the "Netflix model" — is regarded by its proponents as a way for health systems to maximize the number of patients who can access a medication while containing costs. Parts of the U.S.—including Louisiana and Washington—have used it to scale up direct-acting antivirals against hepatitis C. Could we do the same for HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) with long-acting drugs like lenacapavir?

At the recent Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI 2026) held in Denver, Colorado, issues affecting trans communities commanded the spotlight despite the increasingly hostile political environment in the U.S. “Our responsibility as researchers, clinicians, and advocates is to ensure that science, research and data collection translate into equity, dignity, and access for all,” said Jade Ghosn, M.D., Ph.D., from Hôpital Bichat in Paris, France, who moderated a...

Public faith in U.S. federal health agencies is falling off a cliff—but there are reasons for individual clinicians and professional associations to remain hopeful about the influence they still have on their patients’ health, according to new survey results from the Annenberg Public Policy Center.

A combination of ambient air pollution and chronic lung disease may be associated with worse respiratory symptoms among people with HIV, new research has found. It’s the first broad-scale study to look at this relationship in the U.S. The study, which was published in Respiratory Research late last year, looked at cross-sectional data from 338 Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study (MACS) participants and 1,073 Women's Interagency HIV Study (WIHS) participants.

For as long as antiretroviral therapy (ART) has existed, we have worried about HIV’s ability to mutate around it. Few mutations have commanded as much of our attention, for as long a period of time, as M184V/I. After all, it’s not only one of the seminal NRTI drug resistance mutations; it’s also highly relevant in the modern treatment era, which heavily features the use of dolutegravir alongside the backbone NRTI lamivudine. The virus in many people living with HIV today harbors archival M184V/I.