About the Partners Aids Research Center

The Partners AIDS Research Center exists to facilitate multi-disciplinary AIDS research, promote HIV-related education and training, and enhance clinical care of HIV-infected persons. The Center is an independent Unit within the Department of Medicine, and members of the Partners AIDS Research Center hold faculty positions both in the Partners AIDS Research Center as well as in separate subspecialty divisions at their respective institutions. All HIV-related research activities for MGH and BWH are coordinated through the Partners AIDS Research Center.

The establishment of the Partners AIDS Research Center has provided an organizational framework, which has greatly enhanced long-standing collaborations among the initial participating institutions. The institutions of the Partners AIDS Research Center focus on an unusually wide spectrum of HIV-related research from basic molecular biology to clinical investigation, patient care and outreach. Areas of expertise include immunology, virology, oncology, gene therapy, antiviral drug development, maternal fetal transmission and pediatric AIDS, AIDS epidemiology, behavioral sciences, cost efficiency and public policy, endocrinology and metabolism, and vaccine development. The resulting environment ensures that mystifying problems in clinical care are quickly addressed scientifically and that important scientific discoveries rapidly lead to improved patient care, also known as translational research. This has traditionally been a major focus of the Center’s efforts, and enhancing it one of its primary goals.

Since 1981, when people with failing immune systems were perplexing doctors around the world, the clinicians and scientists have collaborated tirelessly to unearth the mysteries of HIV and AIDS and bring relief and hope to those living with the virus.

Groundbreaking discoveries that lead to the highest quality of care available distinguish the Center’s participating institutions as among the world’s pioneering research and care centers for HIV and AIDS. In fact, many "firsts" in the discoveries and treatments of HIV and AIDS have come from scientists and clinicians at the MGH, BWH and Partners AIDS Research Center including:

identification of key host immune responses against HIV, including HIV-specific neutralizing antibodies, cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTL, "killer cells"), and T helper cells;
identification of HIV in semen and the female genital tract, which helped elucidate the mechanisms of HIV transmission;
identification of HIV in the brain, spinal cord, eye, and spinal fluid, which helped to define the neurological and ocular manifestations of HIV infection;
observation that the initial infection by HIV in the U.S. can cause an acute illness lasting days to weeks, which then resolves spontaneously;
facilitation of the first clinical trials of experimental anti-HIV therapies in New England;
demonstration through laboratory tests that treatment with double and triple drug therapies is more effective than single drug regimens;
administration of gene therapy to HIV patients (first in New England); and
first demonstration that effective immune responses to HIV could be boosted to the point that some patients have been able to come off antiviral therapy and continue to control the virus on their own for more than a year.

Today, the Partners AIDS Research Center is pushing harder than ever, both at home and abroad, to bring scientists, clinicians, and patients together to solve the mysteries of HIV and its devastating effect on the human immune system.