HIV Molecular Epidemiology for Prevention

Dear Colleagues,

The molecular epidemiology of infectious diseases is being transformed by the increasing availability of pathogen nucleotide sequence data from advances in sequencing technologies and their global availability. Molecular sequences combined with epidemiologic data are critical for understanding pathogen emergence, transmission histories, identifying reservoirs and new infections, preventing onward transmission, monitoring disease progression, and linking infected persons to treatment and care. In 2017, WHO estimates about 36.9 million people were living with HIV globally. Of those, almost 940,000 died from AIDS-related illnesses and approximately 75% were unaware of their HIV status. For HIV, drug resistance monitoring is the standard of care for new diagnoses, and testing is routinely available at commercial laboratories or frequently done for research studies. More recently, these HIV polymerase sequences are being used to identify persons with genetically similar strains, characterize transmission clusters and dynamics, and recognize clusters with rapid and active transmission, all of which permit focused public health interventions of limited resources to those persons and places with the highest risk of new infections. In the US, rapidly detecting and responding to clusters and outbreaks is a key pillar of the President’s 2019 intitiative “Ending the HIV Epidemic” in the next decade. This goal is consistent with the WHO target of ending the HIV/AIDS epidemic by 2030. Transmission clusters can be identified using network and phylogenetic analyses of molecular sequences, or combinations of both, and bioinformatics methods are used or being developed to determine timing of infection, time–space clusters, the prediction of cluster growth and spread, and the modeling of transmission dynamics and targeted prevention strategies.

This Special Issue aims to provide new insights and advances in the molecular epidemiology of HIV infection, including how molecular epidemiology is being used for surveillance, understanding transmission dynamics (patterns, order, and probability), the spread of HIV locally and globally, phylodynamics, outbreak and cluster detection, transmission networks, the use of partial and whole genomes, ultradeep sequencing for molecular epidemiology, transmitted drug resistance, and the modeling of transmission clusters and targeted prevention strategies. We cordially invite you to contribute original papers and review articles on these and related topics to highlight recent advances in molecular epidemiologic methods used to study HIV transmission and prevention.

Dr. William M. Switzer
Dr. Dimitrios Paraskevis
Guest Editors

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