In 1983, researchers identified HIV as the cause of AIDS. A team at the Institut Pasteur in France, under the leadership of Luc Montagnier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, isolated a new retrovirus from a patient whose lymph nodes were enlarged. They initially named it LAV, which stands for Lymphadenopathy-Associated Virus. This discovery would later earn the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2008.