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