A group of researchers at McGill University in Montreal has recently developed a portable, paper-based electrochemical platform with multiplexing and telemedicine capabilities that may enable low-cost, point-of-care diagnosis of HIV and HCV co-infections within serum samples.
New research in monkeys exposed to SIV, the animal equivalent of HIV, reveals what happens in the very earliest stages of infection, before virus is even detectable in the blood, which is a critical but difficult period to study in humans. The findings, published online today in the journal Cell, have important implications for vaccine development and other strategies to prevent infection.
Inspired by pregnancy tests, researchers have developed a novel method to store microfluidic devices for CD4 T cell testing in extreme weather conditions for up to six months without refrigeration. These devices are used for chemotherapy monitoring, transplant patient monitoring, and especially in monitoring the efficacy of antiretroviral therapy. If produced at a large scale, the device would cost less than $1 compared with the current cost of a CD4 assay which is about $30-$50.
HIV vaccine candidate has shown to generate more than 80% protection in groups of twelve female monkeys against high dose, repeated AIDS virus exposures during part of a preclinical study.
Agencies that serve people with HIV in the U.S. are at the forefront of delivering medical care, shelter, psycho-social counseling and other services to their vulnerable clients. These services are offered through a mix of different types of agencies, including local health departments, state government agencies, non-profits and faith-based organizations. Collaboration among these various entities is essential for holistically serving the needs of their clients. Now, a University of Missouri researcher has published two studies after studying collaboration among these types of agencies in Baltimore, a severely HIV-affected city. Her research offers suggestions for improving HIV prevention, treatment and care and provides an innovation in measuring collaboration among agencies.
Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) and collaborating institutions have described the first-ever immature or “teenage” antibody found in a powerful class of immune molecules effective against HIV.
Experts from Johns Hopkins, less than a week after announcing the world’s first HIV+ to HIV+ liver transplant, outline the special ethical concerns of such transplants in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
According to the World Health Organization, 37 million people are living with HIV. Antiviral medications are used to control the disease and prevent its progression to AIDS. Although antivirals improve health and increase survival for people with HIV, their use also has been linked to the development of cardiovascular disease. Now, researchers at the University of Missouri School of Medicine have identified an enzyme that may reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease caused by HIV medications.
Some people infected with HIV naturally produce antibodies that effectively neutralize many strains of the rapidly mutating virus, and scientists are working to develop a vaccine capable of inducing such “broadly neutralizing” antibodies that can prevent HIV infection.
In an effort to minimize obstacles to adherence and prevent vaginal HIV transmission, UNC researchers and collaborators from Merck demonstrated the effectiveness of a new long-acting formulation of the HIV drug raltegravir in animal models.
The number one killer of HIV patients in resource-limited areas, including parts of Africa and India, is tuberculosis (TB), underscoring the need for optimal treatments and effective strategies to address this deadly co-infection. But TB is harder to detect in HIV-infected patients and diagnostic test results take time, so many healthcare providers prescribe multi-drug TB treatments as a precaution. However, for the first time, findings from a large, randomized clinical trial show that this aggressive approach does not save more lives, researchers from Penn Medicine and other institutions report in The Lancet.
In what investigators say is a surprise finding, results of a new study appear to strongly affirm the effectiveness of prescribing the anti-tuberculosis drug isoniazid alone — in place of the standard four-drug regimen — to prevent TB and reduce death in people with advanced HIV/AIDS infections. Those with HIV and AIDS are highly susceptible to TB.
Researchers at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles studied 11 biomarkers associated with inflammation, bone loss and/or bone formation in about 450 individuals – assessed by sex and HIV status – to try to determine causes of this differential bone loss.
In the first known discovery of its kind, a Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine-led team has found that HIV patients in Africa with a certain genetic variant have a 63-percent lower chance of developing tuberculosis than HIV patients without the genetic variant.
The Black Death swept Europe in the 14th century eliminating up to half of the population but it left genetic clues that now may aid a University of Cincinnati (UC) researcher in treating HIV patients co-infected with hepatitis C using an anti-retroviral drug therapy.
Kenneth Sherman, MD, PhD, Gould Professor of Medicine, says he will look at the blood samples of nearly 3,000 patients, primarily individuals with hemophilia, who were exposed to HIV during the early 1980s and late 1990s, to see if an inherited genetic variant that protects against HIV might also help prevent injury from Hepatitis C and other liver diseases.
A new study from scientists at The Scripps Research Institute describes the high-resolution structure of the HIV protein responsible for recognition and infection of host cells. The studyis the first to show this HIV protein, known as the envelope (Env) trimer, in its natural or “native” form.
One of the most crucial and elusive goals of an effective HIV vaccine is to stimulate antibodies that can attack the virus even as it relentlessly mutates.
Now a research team, led by investigators at the Duke Human Vaccine Institute and the Vaccine Research Center of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), has tracked rare potent antibodies in an HIV-infected individual and determined sequential structures that point to how they developed.
The University of Illinois at Chicago has received a MAC AIDS Fund grant in support of "I'm Still Surviving," an oral history project featuring women’s personal histories of living with HIV and AIDS in the United States.
More than 60 percent of Rhode Island men who have sex with men (MSM) diagnosed with HIV in 2013 reported meeting sexual partners online in the preceding year, according to a study published today in the journal Public Health Reports.
In a small, placebo-controlled clinical trial, Johns Hopkins physicians report that the antidepressant paroxetine modestly improves decision-making and reaction time, and suppresses inflammation in people with HIV-associated cognitive impairment.
Scientists have a new tool for unraveling the mysteries of how diseases such as HIV move through a population, thanks to insights into phylogenetics, the creation of an organism’s genetic tree and evolutionary relationships.
Researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have discovered that HIV infection of human immune cells triggers a massive increase in methylation, a chemical modification, to both human and viral RNA, aiding replication of the virus. The study, published February 22, 2016 in Nature Microbiology, identifies a new mechanism for controlling HIV replication and its interaction with the host immune system.
The antiretroviral (ARV) drug atazanavir—sometimes included in treatments to prevent mother-to-child HIV transmission during pregnancy—may have small but significant effects on infant development, reports a study in the journal AIDS, official journal of the International AIDS Society. AIDS is published by Wolters Kluwer.
Researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have discovered that HIV infection of human immune cells triggers a massive increase in methylation, a chemical modification, to both human and viral RNA, aiding replication of the virus. The study, published February 22, 2016 in Nature Microbiology, identifies a new mechanism for controlling HIV replication and its interaction with the host immune system.
A recent study examined injection risk behaviors among heroin injectors in the Colombian cities of Medellín and Pereira to explore the implications for possible increased HIV transmission within PWID.
In this opinion piece, Sean Bland, JD, an associate at the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, discusses President Obama’s proposed pilot program to increase access to pre-exposure prophylaxis for HIV prevention.
Johns Hopkins recently received approval from the United Network for Organ Sharing to be the first hospital in the U.S. to perform HIV-positive to HIV-positive organ transplants. The institution will be the first in the nation to do an HIV-positive to HIV-positive kidney transplant and the first in the world to execute an HIV-positive to HIV-positive liver transplant.
For the first time, investigators in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine have determined how antiretroviral therapy (ART) affects the way HIV disseminates and establishes infection in the female reproductive tract. These observations have significant implications for future HIV prevention, vaccine and cure studies.
Scientists found HIV is still replicating in lymphoid tissue, even when it is undetectable in the blood of patients on antiretroviral drugs. The findings provide a critical new perspective on how HIV persists in the body despite potent antiretroviral therapy. They also offer a path to a cure and show the importance delivering drugs at effective concentrations where the virus continues to replicate in the patients.
UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers have deciphered how a small protein made by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS manipulates human genes to further its deadly agenda.
New research finds that the most commonly used test for tuberculosis fails to accurately diagnose TB in up to 50 percent of pregnant women who are HIV+. The research published early online in the American Thoracic Society’s American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine is believed to be the first study to compare the accuracy of two TB tests – the Quantiferon Gold In Tube® blood test and the more commonly used TST or tuberculin skin test—in this population. The study “Quantitative IFN-, IL-2 Response and Latent Tuberculosis Test Discordance in HIV-infected Pregnant Women” is also the first study to examine pregnancy’s effect on the body’s response to TB.
Scientists from The Wistar Institute, in collaboration with the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS at Yale University, have demonstrated that the issue of missing data can be successfully overcome using appropriate statistical methods, and as a result, they were able to show how early initiation of ART in infants preserves an expansion of naïve T-cells and allows the infant’s immune system to be properly reconstructed.
The researchers reviewed major studies of both PrEP for HIV prevention and aspirin for heart attack prevention. They found that both had similar low rates of serious side effects. Aspirin users rarely had serious bleeding or death and PrEP users rarely had serious kidney or bone damage.
Among HIV-positive patients with Hodgkin lymphoma, a new study finds that blacks are significantly less likely than whites to receive treatment for the cancer, even though chemotherapy saves lives.
A new pilot study led by Shannon Morrison, Ph.D., is exploring the effects of a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet with adequate protein in older persons living with HIV.
In a new study, a team led by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute tracked how a family of these HIV-fighting antibodies develops over time. The research shows how a future vaccine might trigger the immune system to produce these antibodies more effectively.
Access to harm reduction programs such as syringe exchange is lowest in rural and suburban areas, where rates of addiction to heroin and other opioids are on the rise, according to a study led by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and published online today in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
In newly published research, scientists at The Wistar Institute show that continued semen exposure in sex workers sustains changes in the cervical and vaginal microenvironment that may actually increase HIV-1 resistance. This information may lead the way to better preventative strategies that block the transmission of the virus and improved designs for future HIV vaccine studies that can monitor the described changes when recruiting sex workers into vaccine trials.
Not every virus wants to go viral — at least, not immediately. Some want to slip in quietly. Hide. Wait for the perfect opportunity to attack.
In order to do so, the virus has to find a way to enter the cells of the human body without tripping the alarm, and stay there without notice. It’s how HIV works, and also how viruses in the herpesvirus family, like human cytomegalovirus (HCMV), do their business.
NEW YORK (December 1, 2015)— Today, the New York State Department of Health AIDS Institute (NYSDOH) will honor the Montefiore AIDS Center staff for their work in the field of HIV/AIDS and Alain Litwin M.D. for his contributions to the field of hepatitis C (HCV). New York is home to approximately 116,000 people living with HIV or AIDS. Additionally, an estimated 200,000 New Yorkers have chronic hepatitis C, which like HIV, can be acquired by contact with blood.
Loyola offers HIV testing to all ED patients. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), of the 1.2 million Americans living with AIDS, one in eight do not know they are infected. To raise awareness for the importance of this potentially deadly infectious disease, December 1 is World AIDS Day.
In a study into the prevention of HIV transmission, people who took the antiretroviral drug Truvada were 86% less likely to contract the disease than those who took a placebo, report the researchers who led the study.