AIDS researchers and policymakers from around the globe are gathering in Melbourne, Australia, for a major international conference that starts this Monday. They’ll be mourning dozens of colleagues who died in the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.
But the work of the conference will continue, and one of the major topics to be discussed is expanding the use of a pill that prevents HIV.
A new study of German gay men finds that those who discuss HIV before sex are much less likely to acquire the virus and also finds that HIV has a tendency to transmit during the first six months of a relationship, aidsmap reports. Publishing their findings in BMC Public Health, researchers studied 105 gay men with recently diagnosed HIV and compared them with 105 HIV-negative controls, collecting the data between 2008 and 2010.
A condom that can kill the HIV virus and designed by a bio-tech firm in Australia is set to hit stores within the next few months.
One of the studies that looked at the efficiency of a new three-drug combination, which included ABT450, Ritonavir and an NS5A inhibitor, found 97 per cent of patients had no trace of Hepatitis C twelve weeks after treatment.
South Africa’s Anova Health Institute is deeply saddened by the news that more than 100 AIDS researchers, activists and health workers, who were en route to attend the 20th International AIDS Conference taking place in Melbourne, Australia, were on board the Malaysian Airlines MH17 flight that crashed over Ukraine yesterday. Anova sends condolences to the families, friends and colleagues of those who have been lost to this tragedy.
(Medical Xpress)—Yuet Wai Kan of the University of California, San Francisco and colleagues have created HIV-resistant white blood cells by editing the genomes of induced pluripotent stem cells. The researchers inserted genes with a mutation that confers resistance to HIV into stem cells. White blood cells grown from these stem cells were HIV resistant. The research appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is supporting 11 condom designs with grants of $100,000 each to improve user experience, according to a foundation statement. The grants are funded through its Grand Challenges Explorations initiative, which supports innovative ideas to tackle key global health and development problems.
Scientists have identified a new way to reactivate latent HIV, which could help overcome one of the biggest obstacles to finding a cure for the deadly virus. Researchers at the Gladstone Institutes found that increasing the random activity, or noise, associated with HIV gene expression – without increasing the average level of gene expression – can reactivate latent HIV.
Using advanced tools to probe B-cell responses to HIV and other pathogens in the laboratory, the researchers found that the B cells that make antibodies to HIV in infected, untreated people are abnormal in that they are more activated, unstable and unresponsive to further stimulation than normal B cells, and also are infrequently observed in healthy people. This finding may help explain why HIV-specific antibodies naturally produced by HIV-infected people do not clear the infection, according to the scientists.
Out of 90 vaccine attempts, only 5 vaccine candidates were worthy of progressing to phase two or phase three human efficacy trials, and of those five, only two vaccines continue in clinical trials today — one in this country and one in South Africa. But we can’t stop now.