Feature Channels: AIDS and HIV

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A recent groundbreaking study from University of Virginia School of Medicine researchers now provides strong evidence that the KSHV virus invades the body through human saliva and silently infects a certain type of B cell found in the tonsils. Their findings, published in the February issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation (JCI) and featured as an “Editor’s Pick,” could help scientists block the spread of the virus within an individual and between people, thus preventing the early onset of cancer.

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A section of the AIDS virus's protein envelope once considered an improbable target for a vaccine now appears to be one of the most promising, new research by Dana-Farber Cancer Institute scientists indicates.

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If Congress reversed its ban on allowing people with HIV to be organ donors after their death, roughly 500 HIV-positive patients with kidney or liver failure each year could get transplants within months, rather than the years they currently wait on the list, new Johns Hopkins research suggests.

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Researchers at FAU have identified more than a dozen cellular proteins that are required by HIV in order to replicate efficiently. They are testing the possibility of obstructing the activity of these proteins to limit viral replication, and also exploring a novel set of technologies to further characterize the mechanism by which HIV replicates within human cells. Identifying these cellular factors provides hope for developing new therapeutics.

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The 14-day period recommended by New York State may not be good enough for detecting HIV. Screening may need to occur on the very day of the transplant says expert.

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National Women and Girls AIDS Awareness Day, a nationwide observance that raises awareness and promotes action in the fight against HIV/AIDS, took place on March 10. As the nation turns its attention to this important cause, women and girls around the world continue to be affected by HIV/AIDS in high numbers. According to reports from the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS, HIV is the leading cause of death and disease among women of reproductive age across the globe.

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The American Thoracic Society has released a new report detailing recent global changes in the management of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-associated pulmonary disease. The report examines the evolving landscape of HIV and its associated diseases in areas where combination antiretroviral therapies (ART) are available, as well as offering insight into the trends occurring in areas of the world where ART use is limited.

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An "implementation science" approach will play a critical role in the next phase of The U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), according to an editorial in JAIDS: Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health.

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Useful for identifying immunologic factors that lead to AIDS in HIV-infected patients.

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Use of social networking websites by homeless youth can lead to an increase in risky sexual behaviors. But homeless kids who used these sites were also more likely to have been tested for sexually transmitted infections and to be better informed about preventing such infections and HIV

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New research enhances the current knowledge of how HIV-1, which causes AIDS, controls the cell cycle of cells that it infects. The new findings may shed light on how the virus reactivates from a latent state.

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In a study that included infants from South Africa, those who were exposed to human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) at birth but did not become infected had lower levels of antibodies to diseases such as pertussis, tetanus and pneumococcus, compared to infants of non-HIV infected mothers, according to a study in the February 9 issue of JAMA.

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Teenage girls and young women infected with HIV get pregnant more often and suffer pregnancy complications more frequently than their HIV-negative peers, according to new research led by Johns Hopkins investigators.

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Study suggests that HIV pushes a specific subset of the CD4+ “helper” T-cell toward more rapid aging by as much as 20 to 30 years over a three-year period. These findings could partially explain why older HIV-positive people progress to AIDS more rapidly than younger ones, and why younger ones develop illnesses more common to older people.

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While the overall hospitalization rate for stroke has declined in recent years, the numbers have jumped dramatically for patients infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), suggesting they may be up to three times more likely to suffer a stroke than people uninfected by the virus that causes AIDS.

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New research suggests that people infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) may be up to three times more likely to have a stroke compared to those not affected with HIV. The study is published in the January 19, 2011, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

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HIV-positive head and neck cancer patients respond well to radiation therapy treatments and experience similar toxicity rates as non-HIV-positive patients, despite prior reports to the contrary, according to a study in the January issue of the International Journal of Radiation Oncology•Biology•Physics, an official journal of the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO).

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Identifying tuberculosis patients in Africa using passive methods is leaving many cases undiagnosed, according to researchers from the Netherlands, Kenya and the United States, who studied case detection methods in HIV-prone western Kenya. Tuberculosis (TB) occurs commonly in men and women with HIV, but in these patients TB can be more difficult to detect.

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Program widens reach to five nations to enhance participants' scholarship, professional capacities in HIV/AIDS nursing care.

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Two teams of researchers at UC San Diego and other U.S. and African universities and the World Bank have documented significant spillover benefits of a drug therapy to combat AIDS symptoms and a novel prevention strategy that focuses on girls in Sub-Saharan Africa, an area with two-thirds of the world’s HIV infections.

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On November 9, 2010, several members of the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine (SAHM) addressed the Office of AIDS Research Advisory Council at a meeting entitled “HIV/AIDS and Adolescents.” SAHM members were invited to testify on all aspects of HIV in this age group and to suggest ways to combat it most effectively.

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Mayo Clinic researchers have shown why, in a minority of HIV patients, immune function improves despite a lack of response to standard anti-retroviral treatment.

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HIV infected patients whose treatment is delayed not only become sicker than those treated earlier, but also require tens of thousands of dollars more in care over the first several years of their treatment.

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Researchers at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago have solved a 20-year puzzle: why natural killer cells fail to protect the body against HIV. The discovery opens up a new target for drug therapies.

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Even in the Age of Information myths and misconceptions abound about HIV/AIDS prevention and transmission. But, according to UNC Charlotte Associate Professor of Sociology Diane Zablotsky, the most damaging response to HIV/AIDS is silence. Silence has contributed to an upsurge of HIV cases among individuals 50 and older over the course of the epidemic.

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The development of new drugs to treat and prevent HIV/AIDS depends on understanding the basic biology of how the virus infects human cells. For 25 years, researchers supported primarily by NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) have been generating the structures of key viral proteins, revealing important insights into the virus’s mechanisms and, more importantly, its Achilles’ heels.

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World AIDS Day is December 1, but healthcare professionals at Temple University work year-round to combat HIV by focusing on reducing the community viral load, or the severity of HIV in a particular group. This approach has become widespread in the past two years, and it is still evolving and undergoing evaluation.

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As the global HIV/AIDS community prepares to commemorate World AIDS Day 2010 on December 1, there is a growing recognition that rapid HIV testing is a vital tool in battling the rising incidence of this disease around the world.

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As the global HIV/AIDS community prepares to commemorate World AIDS Day 2010 on December 1, there is a growing recognition that the development of an HIV vaccine is a vital step in battling the rising incidence of AIDS around the world.

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A new Ryerson University study suggests that homeless youth have sex at an earlier age as a way to gain approval from their partners.

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A new study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health examines the burden of HIV and sexually transmitted disease among male clients of the commercial sex industry in China’s Sichuan province. Since 2007, heterosexual transmission has replaced injecting drug use as the primary transmission mode of all HIV infections in China.

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UCLA has received a $4.6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study ways to get HIV-positive men who have been released from Los Angeles County jails into medical care and on sustained treatment. The study — one of 12 taking place across the nation — could have a long-term impact on the HIV epidemic in Los Angeles.

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The University of Illinois at Chicago has received a $7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study effective ways to seek, test, and treat inmates with HIV.

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New insights into the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection process may now be possible through a research method recently developed in part at NIST.

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In a technical tour de force, structural biologists funded by the National Institutes of Health have determined the three-dimensional structure of a molecule involved in HIV infection and in many forms of cancer. The high-resolution structure sheds light on how the molecule functions and could point to ways to control its activity, potentially locking out HIV and stalling cancer’s spread.

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For married couples in which one partner is HIV-positive and the other is HIV-negative, antiretroviral therapy (ART) does not reduce the risk of transmitting HIV to the uninfected partner, according to a study from China in the October issue of JAIDS: Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes. JAIDS is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health, a leading provider of information and business intelligence for students, professionals, and institutions in medicine, nursing, allied health, pharmacy and the pharmaceutical industry.

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Investigators at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill comprise one of 12 scientific teams in more than a dozen states that will receive National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants to study effective ways to prevent and treat HIV/AIDS among people in the criminal justice system.

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The first U.S. National AIDS Strategy "makes epidemiologic sense" and can meet its central goal of achieving a 25 percent reduction in the incidence of AIDS by 2015, according to an editorial in JAIDS: Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes.

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A biomedical engineer at the University of Arkansas has developed a molecular probe that can be used to determine the efficacy and efficiency of drugs targeting HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

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Study finds no significant gender-based differences in response to two anti-HIV drugs and demonstrates it is possible to recruit large numbers of women into clinical trials. But women dropped out of trial at higher rates than men.

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A “test and treat” strategy, the leading proposal by the World Health Organization to combat HIV/AIDS in South Africa, is seriously flawed, say UCLA researchers.

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An ancestor of HIV that infects monkeys is thousands of years older than previously thought, suggesting that HIV, which causes AIDS, would take hundreds of lifetimes to naturally evolve into a non-lethal virus.

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Dendritic cells are the grand sentinels of the immune system, standing guard 24/7 to detect foreign invaders such as viruses and bacteria, and bring news of the invasion to other immune cells to marshal an attack. These sentinels, however, nearly always fail to respond adequately to HIV, the virus causing AIDS. Now a team of scientists at NYU Langone Medical Center has discovered a sensor in dendritic cells that recognizes HIV, spurring a more potent immune response by the sentinels to the virus. They report their findings in the September 9, 2010, issue of Nature.

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Simply teaching people the facts about how to protect themselves from HIV may not be enough to prevent the spread of AIDS in Africa, a new study suggests.

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HIV-infected children in South Africa who were exposed to the drug nevirapine at birth (used to help prevent mother-to-child HIV transmission) and then received a protease inhibitor (PI) for viral suppression achieved lower rates of viremia (virus in the blood stream) if they were switched to nevirapine, compared to children who continued on the PI-based regimen, according to a study in the September 8 issue of JAMA. PI-based therapies generally have a higher cost compared to nevirapine, which may leave some children excluded from treatment.

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Prompted by clinical research into the early initiation of antiretroviral therapies for HIV performed at the GHESKIO clinic in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, the World Health Organization (WHO) has revised its treatment protocols for HIV patients.

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Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health reviewed published data to assess HIV-infected children’s immune responses to vaccines and found that most children treated with HAART remained susceptible to vaccine-preventable diseases, but responded well to revaccination.

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Vitamin A and beta-carotene supplements are unsafe for HIV-positive women who breastfeed because they may boost the excretion of HIV in breast milk---thereby increasing the chances of transmitting the infection to the child, a pair of new studies suggest.

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Using a $225,000 microscope and the wisdom of Yogi Berra, researchers have identified the key components of a protein called TRIM5α that destroys HIV in rhesus monkeys.

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Because of the difficulty raising antibodies that are capable of totally blocking natural HIV infections, the GeoVax vaccine approach has focused on raising cellular immune responses in addition to antibodies, which together should be better able to block and control the infections than either can alone.