While significant progress has been made in HIV vaccine research, according to Penn State Professor Dipanjan Pan, there is currently no approved vaccine for HIV. Research is ongoing, though, he said, with multiple preventive and therapeutic strategies under investigation—but some vaccine candidates can cause participants to falsely test HIV-positive, complicating diagnosis and clinical management.

To solve this issue, Pan and his team developed a new approach capable of differentiating active HIV infection from false positives—which could potentially accelerate vaccine development and testing, Pan said. The researchers partnered with the HIV Vaccine Trials Network of the National Institutes of Health’s Vaccine Research Center to test 104 human blood samples with their new device.