Molly Ohainle was growing up in the Bay Area when the AIDS crisis hit. She lost both of her uncles to HIV. Now, she researches HIV as a professor of immunology and molecular medicine at UC Berkeley.
Medical treatments of HIV have advanced considerably in the last few decades, but Ohainle stresses that there is still so much we don’t know about the rapidly evolving virus. She spoke with UC Berkeley writer Alexander Rony about the present status of HIV research.
Molly Ohainle: Primarily, we're trying to understand the basic mechanics of how viruses infect cells with the goals of identifying novel approaches to treat and cure people of viral infections. The work in my lab is almost entirely focused on HIV and related retroviral infections. We're very much on the basic science end of trying to figure out how these viruses work and how our cells can resist and fail to resist infection. Another aspect of the work is how our genes have been fine-tuned over many years of evolution to deal with this constant onslaught from viral infections.
There's a lot we know, especially about HIV-1 — which is the virus that causes the global pandemic — but there are important things we still don't know. We previously didn't appreciate that the core part of the HIV particle can actually get into the nucleus of cells, which is a whole new approach to understanding how these viruses infect cells, and that was just discovered in the last several years.
One of the most exciting things in HIV research at the moment is a new drug that was developed. It was the science breakthrough of the year in 2024, because it's a long-lasting small molecule therapeutic that is now in clinical trials for a pre-exposure type of treatment. It has incredible efficacy against the virus.
This virus has been around a long time, likely emerging in the early to mid-1900s. It only emerged in the U.S. as a major public health threat in the 1980s. Our ability to treat chronic HIV infection is a huge success story in terms of drug development. It's almost unprecedented in the biomedical field, but there is still a need to develop better, more potent, more long-acting therapies. This drug seems to fit the bill. It's exciting, because it's a whole new class of drug to treat infection that was not predicted ahead of time.
From a basic science perspective, it's an exciting thing because of how much this might transform the way that we treat people with HIV infections. One of the projects in my lab is trying to understand how the mutations that come out in response to treatment with this drug impact replication of the virus.
I grew up in the Bay Area in the 1980s. My first experience with HIV/AIDS was very close to home: both of my uncles died of HIV/AIDS in the 1990s. That's something that I experienced when I was in middle school and going into high school. At the time, I remember it being scary how everything was unfolding.
It's come full circle where now I get to work on something that definitely impacted my life when I was younger and has impacted my family. I'm really interested in the global health implications of the work that we do. I'm good at basic science puzzles. Berkeley is a great place for me in that way, in this department, where I can do basic science research that has those kinds of implications.
HIV is a virus that mutates frequently and is a chronic infection. You're sampling a huge number of mutations just in a single person. There is a huge amount of diversity — orders of magnitude bigger than influenza or even SARS‑CoV‑2. It's been a huge concern for people trying to develop HIV therapeutics and vaccines. You don't want to make a therapy that can only be used on a tiny slice of these viruses.
The HIV-1 pandemic is a result of a single cross-species transmission event that probably happened about 100 years ago. But there are other related viruses, including HIV-2. It's a virus that has jumped species over a dozen times that we know of and likely many more times that have gone undetected.
We would love to understand why some retroviruses are capable of jumping to humans, and some are not. We have some exciting new results in our lab that may explain why HIV only comes from certain populations of chimpanzees and not others. We know of over 40 primates with viruses that look very much like HIV-1. These primates have been infected with their own HIV-1-like virus for millions of years, and we would like to understand what properties of those viruses are allowing them to efficiently infect those host cells. Can that help us understand how HIV-1 became a global pandemic?
Having just lived through the SARS‑CoV‑2 pandemic, this idea that all of a sudden a virus can come into our lives and completely upend us feels very raw for many people, myself included. There's a huge array of viruses in the world. We're interacting with these viruses more often than we appreciate. It's really rare that zoonotic transfers actually take off. At this point, it's virtually impossible to predict. It's important to figure out how to deal with it when it happens.
Some people think that scientists know all these things, and we're holding our cards back, like we have all the answers. Actually, we just don't know. HIV-1 is a well-studied virus, but there's still a lot we don't understand about how it works. Any newer type of virus has many more unknowns.
The HIV research community is incredibly collaborative. We frequently interact with researchers at many other institutions. For example, I have a collaborative project on resistant mutations that's funded by an NIH grant through the University of Utah.
In terms of what I do in the space of HIV, the goals have not changed. The work has not fundamentally shifted, so I don't think it's affected us as much as other fields. Many HIV researchers started studying coronaviruses. Some have come back to study retroviruses again, some have not.
It's an interesting time to be a virologist. Many of us got into this business because we want to help people. The pandemic got many young scientists interested in basic virology research.
I look for people who are curious and motivated by understanding how things work. They often want to move a field forward, change something, or cure a disease. The fun of it is to help them find projects where they can solve puzzles and also find out something that might have a big impact on biomedical research in general.
The students we get at Berkeley are awesome. They're the best. They're incredibly smart and talented and often have a lot of experience. We're very fortunate. We get fantastic students here.
Berkeley's magic. Doing research here is amazing. It's an incredible place to do science.
