As the ongoing coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated, new mutations in viral genetic sequences can have significant impacts on the virus’s transmissibility and the damage it causes. For many years, there have been concerns that this could arise in the HIV-1 virus, which already affects 38 million people worldwide, and has caused 33 million deaths to date, according to the UNAIDS. This has now been confirmed with the discovery of a new, highly virulent HIV strain in the Netherlands, in a study led by researchers from the University of Oxford’s Big Data Institute. The results are published in Science.