Monotherapy with the antiviral drug tecovirimat was safe but ineffective as an mpox treatment in an international clinical trial.

DoxyPEP is reducing the rate of syphilis and chlamydia but has had little to no effect on gonorrhea and needs close monitoring for antibiotic resistance.

Tecovirimat was safe but did not reduce the time to lesion resolution or reduce pain among adults with mild to moderate clade II mpox and a low risk of severe disease in an international study.

Providing optional syphilis tests to most people seeking care at a large emergency department led to a dramatic increase in syphilis screening and diagnosis, according to study of nearly 300,000 emergency department encounters in Chicago. Most people diagnosed had no symptoms, which suggests that symptom-based testing strategies alone could miss opportunities to diagnose and treat people with syphilis.

A dose-sparing intradermal mpox vaccination regimen was safe and generated an antibody response equivalent to that induced by the standard regimen at six weeks (two weeks after the second dose), according to findings presented today at the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases Global Congress in Barcelona. The results suggest that antibody responses contributed to the effectiveness of dose-sparing mpox vaccine regimens used during the 2022 U.S. outbreak.

NIAID maintains contracts to support the development of emerging HIV therapeutics, vaccines, and non-vaccine biomedical prevention (nBP) candidates. As promising adult and pediatric formulations emerge for the treatment and prevention of HIV and co-infections, there is a critical need to move these candidates rapidly and efficiently into clinical testing.

The National Biocontainment Laboratories (NBLs) and Regional Biocontainment Laboratories (RBLs) provide BSL4/3/2 and BSL3/2 biocontainment facilities, respectively, for research on biodefense and emerging infectious disease agents.  

NIAID’s Diagnostics Development Services program offers reagents, platform testing, and planning and design support to accelerate product development of in vitro diagnostics (IVD) for infectious diseases, from research feasibility through clinical validation.

The AIDS Imaging Research Section (AIRS) leverages preclinical and translational molecular imaging to study the pathogenesis of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection using the simian/simian-human immunodeficiency virus (SIV/SHIV) nonhuman primate model.

The oral antibiotic doxycycline prevented the acquisition of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) when tested among study participants who took the medication within 72 hours of having condomless sex. The post-exposure approach, termed doxy-PEP, resulted in a two-thirds reduction in the incidence of syphilis, gonorrhea, and chlamydia among the study participants.