Last Gift Study

HIV-positive people have few opportunities to take part in various researches or studies on finding cure for HIV, because of different social stereotypes and prohibitions. Some people wish they could participate in studies, they possibly may help future generations.

“The Last Gift study is for people who are HIV infected, who have a terminal illness such as cancer or advanced heart disease, and who have a prognosis of living less than 6 months. We ask those terminally sick people whether they want to participate in HIV cure studies to look at how HIV persists and lies dormant in various tissues throughout the body. We monitor those individuals and collect blood and detailed clinical information while they are alive, and they donate their full bodies to the study on their death. This allows us to look at how the data we obtained during life correlate with data obtained from the brain, genital tract, and lymph nodes after death. An HIV cure is important, both scientifically and culturally. Scientifically, the pursuit of an HIV cure will open up more understanding of human biology, as HIV research has done for the last 30 years. These discoveries will likely push beyond HIV, as it has in the past. HIV cure will be important for the world as a great human achievement and would eliminate a lot of the stigma and the discrimination that accompanies HIV. That will help humanity be a little more human” - said Davey Smith, MD, professor of medicine and head of the Division of Infectious Disease at the University of California, San Diego.