One of the hot topics at this year's Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections will be long COVID: potential causes, biomarkers, and the significance of viral rebound.
A virologist and physician-scientist at Johns Hopkins Medicine, Annie Antar, MD, PhD, will be presenting research on long COVID and viral rebound and clearance at the 2025 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, taking place March 9-12 in San Francisco. Her work focuses on identifying biomarkers and potential causes of long COVID, leveraging her expertise in viral reservoirs from HIV cure research.
In this interview, she previews findings she will be presenting from 2 large studies—Test Us at Home and Test Us at Home Daily—that identified areas in the US with high SARS-CoV-2 transmission rates. More than 7000 participants were enrolled, who regularly self-collected nasal swabs. A retrospective analysis was conducted among the individuals who tested positive (> 400), and their long COVID status was based on World Health Organization criteria. These individuals had documented acute infection, viral clearance rates, and viral rebound, or testing positive after initially testing negative.
Primary findings of this research are that slower viral clearance was strongly associated with development of long COVID, having more symptoms equated with slower viral clearance, and a potential link was found between viral rebound and higher risk of developing long COVID.
“For the people who did report having long COVID, having a higher slope—so that means a slower viral clearance rate—was strongly associated with having long COVID later,” she explains. “And it actually had kind of a dose-response curve, where the people who had more symptoms had the slower clearance.”
In addition to her own research, Antar says she is looking forward to Monday’s plenary personation on HIV cure from Ole S. Søgaard, PhD, professor, Department of Clinical Medicine/Infectious Diseases, Aarhus University; conference sessions on long COVID, including the Wednesday plenary presentation on long COVID from Roger Paredes, MD, PhD, head of the Infectious Diseases Department at the Hospital Germans Trias i Pujol; and sessions on viral rebound, HIV, and neuropathogenesis and proviral landscapes.
ALL Disparities, Treatment Gaps: AYA Patients Face Unique Challenges
June 4th 2025Adolescent and young adult (AYA) patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) face significant survival disparities and unmet needs for effective third-line treatments, highlighting urgent care gaps.
Read More
Laundromats as a New Frontier in Community Health, Medicaid Outreach
May 29th 2025Lindsey Leininger, PhD, and Allister Chang, MPA, highlight the potential of laundromats as accessible, community-based settings to support Medicaid outreach, foster trust, and connect families with essential health and social services.
Listen
In VERIFY, Rusfertide Spares Most Patients With PV a Phlebotomy for 32 Weeks, Improves QOL
June 3rd 2025Adding rusfertide to standard of care more than doubled the share of patients with polycythemia vera (PV) who did not meet criteria for a phlebotomy, according to data from the VERIFY trial.
Read More
Depth of Responses, PFS in Transplant-Ineligible Patients Match Overall Findings in CEPHEUS
June 2nd 2025Quadruplet therapy is now the accepted standard for patients newly diagnosed with myeloma who are ineligible for transplant; there is debate whether all newly diagnosed patients should have this regimen.
Read More
Trastuzumab Deruxtecan Plus Pertuzumab Improves PFS vs Standard Care in HER2+ Breast Cancer
June 2nd 2025Trastuzumab deruxtecan plus pertuzumab demonstrated statistically and clinically significant improvement in progression-free survival (PFS) in HER2-positive breast cancer, potentially representing a new standard of care.
Read More