Early reports from CROI 2019: breakthroughs in HIV care

4 March 2019. Related: News.

Simon Collins, HIV i-Base

This year the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI 2019) was held from 4–7 March in Seattle.

The meeting had an exciting programme with research that will be reported over at least the next three issues of HTB.

Headline news included:

• Breakthroughs in cure research including two new cases of potential cures – defined as sustained remission off-ART. One case is from the UK and another from Germany. Limited case details were reported in a New York times article before the CROI presentations.
• HIV and pregnancy including numerous studies looking at risk of neural tube defects at conception with integrase inhibitors.
• Urgently-needed information on dosing dolutegravir in paediatric populations.
• Strategies for treating MDR-TB as well as treating and preventing TB in people receiving ART regimens.
• Pipeline HIV drugs, including bNAbs and long-acting formulations and new classes of capsid inhibitors and maturation inhibitors.
• PrEP (including first results with TAF).
• Numerous complications, including obesity, cardiovascular risk and bone health.
• Side effects, including whether integrase inhibitors are linked to weight gain.

CROI is notable for providing same-day or next-day webcasts for most talks and comprehensive online access to abstracts and PDF files for posters.

This year HTB with include summary highlights for each day of the conference, with links to key studies.
http://www.croiconference.org

Early articles will be posted as links below.

• Same-day ART is effective in San Francisco Rapid-ART clinic
• Dolutegravir/3TC dual ART is as effective at lowest viral load cut-off as triple therapy in GEMINI Studies
• Double doses of darunavir given with rifampicin lead to high rates of hepatoxicity
• Dolutegravir can be given with 3HP to prevent TB without dose adjustment
• Raltegravir achieves swifter viral load suppression in pregnancy than efavirenz
• New option for PrEP – TAF/FTC is non-inferior to TDF/FTC: results of phase 3 DISCOVER study
• Phase 3 results with dual therapy cabotegravir/rilpivirine long-acting injections: ATLAS and FLAIR studies
• Shared housing compared to living alone: higher CD4, lower viral load and reduced inflammation in macaques
• Viral reservoir can explain persistent low level viraemia with good adherence on ART
• Dolutegravir suppresses viral suppression faster than efavirenz in late pregnancy:  results from DolPHIN-2
• UK patient likely to be the second person cured of HIV: two further cases at CROI 2019 of HIV remission after allogenic stem cell transplants
• i-Base Fit for Purpose report launched at CROI 2019
• Pre-CROI Community HIV Cure Workshop 2019