Basic Science

Basic scientific research refers to a broad category of activities focused on understanding how and why different processes happen. These can be disease processes, or simple biological processes in plants, animals, and other organisms. In the case of HIV, basic science questions explore how HIV infection happens, the life cycle of the virus, and how the virus affects the immune system. These questions are at the core of some of the scientific challenges confronting the biomedical HIV prevention research field. In this way, they're "basic" to everything else that needs to be done. Basic science isn't aimed at developing a product, but the discoveries that come from basic scientific research can lead to ideas for new candidates as well as future directions for HIV research.