Scientists at the University of Basel discovered a fundamental new mechanism explaining the inadequate immune defense against chronic viral infection. These results may open up new avenues for vaccine development. They have been published in the journal “Science Immunology”.
Earlier this month, amfAR released a new report, “Curbing the HIV Epidemic by Supporting Effective Engagement in HIV Care: Recommendations for Health Plans and Health Care Purchasers,” which highlights the critical role of health plans and health care purchasers, including Medicaid and Medicare programs, marketplaces, and employers, in moving the nation toward ending the domestic HIV epidemic.
Only four in 10 gay and bisexual men in Baltimore without HIV are aware that pre-exposure prophylaxis medication (PrEP) may significantly reduce their risk of contracting the virus, even those who had recently visited a doctor or been tested for a sexually transmitted disease, new Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health research suggests.
Cardiovascular disease has become the leading cause of death for those living with HIV, as the infection has moved from a terminal disease to a chronic illness. An article in Critical Care Nurse provides an overview of risk factors, pathophysiology and unique treatment options related to cardiovascular disease in persons living with HIV.
A team of researchers led by Wayne State University has been awarded funding as a part of the Adolescent Medicine Trials Network for HIV/AIDS Interventions, a research network devoted to the health and well-being of adolescents and young adults with HIV or at risk for HIV infection. The Wayne State team, led by Sylvie Naar, Ph.D., professor and division director of behavioral sciences in the Department of Family Medicine and Public Health Sciences at the Wayne State School of Medicine and associate director of the Pediatric Prevention Research Center, has been awarded an anticipated total of $15.7 million dollars over five years from the National Institute of Child and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health, for the project, Scale it Up.
People under the age of 30 account for the majority of new HIV infections in the United States. This age group is also more likely than adults to own a smartphone. Recognizing adolescents’ connection with mobile technology, a research team at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, along with colleagues at Emory University, has secured $18 million in funding over the next five years from the National Institutes of Health to form the UNC/Emory Center for Innovative Technology or iTech.
Discovery of a novel, advanced technique to identify the rare cells where human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) hides in patients taking antiretroviral therapy (ART). This is an important step forward in the search for a HIV/AIDS cure.
A clinical trial underway – known as the AMP study (for Antibody Meditated Prevention) – will determine whether infusing an experimental antibody (VRC01) into HIV-negative men and transgender individuals who have sex with men, will prevent the acquisition of HIV.
A new study from scientists at The Scripps Research Institute shows that “holes” in HIV’s defensive sugar shield could be important in designing an HIV vaccine.
A series of new studies led by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute and the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative describe a potential vaccination strategy to jump-start the selection and evolution of broadly effective antibodies to prevent HIV infection.
Dr. Jonathan Karn has been awarded the 2016 Drexel Prize in Translational Medicine by the Institute for Molecular Medicine and Infectious Disease at Drexel University College of Medicine in Philadelphia.
Tuberculosis (TB) is the leading cause of death worldwide among people infected with HIV. But as yet, no test can reliably show when latent (inactive) TB infections in people with HIV starts progressing to active—and potentially fatal—TB disease. Now, a researcher at Albert Einstein College of Medicine has received a five-year, $3.7 million National Institutes of Health grant to identify biomarkers that signal an increase in activity by Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), the bacterium that causes TB, in people with HIV.
A study from Emory AIDS researchers shows how the expected disease severity when someone is newly infected by HIV reflects a balance between the virus' invisibility to the host's immune system and its ability to reproduce.
Enrique del Castillo has been awarded $270,568 by the National Science Foundation to develop statistical methods that will improve the formulation and manufacturing of drugs used to treat some of the world’s deadliest diseases.
People in Africa’s Sub-Sahara region, a relatively undeveloped area, are generally satisfied with their sex lives, with the most common rating — reported by 18 percent of survey respondents — being a perfect “10,” according to Baylor University research to be presented Monday, Aug. 22, at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA).
Being homeless puts people at greater risk of HIV infection than those with stable housing, but targeting services to reduce risk behaviors is often complicated by fuzzy definitions of homelessness.
Brooklyn, NY – SUNY Downstate Medical Center’s Special Treatment and Research (STAR) Program has been awarded $1.9 million in new grant funding from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to provide enhanced HIV prevention services throughout Brooklyn using the latest biomedical tools, Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) and Post-Exposure Prophylaxis for HIV (PEP).
CHAPEL HILL, NC –UNC School of Medicine’s Anne Lyerly is addressing the urgent need for effective HIV prevention and treatment for the estimated 1.5 million women worldwide with HIV who give birth each year. Lyerly, associate director of the UNC Center for Bioethics and associate professor of social medicine at the UNC School of Medicine, is also an obstetrician/gynecologist who studies ethically complex clinical and policy issues related to women’s reproductive health.
Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore, in collaboration with the City University of New York (CUNY), have received a $9.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to lead research in Central Africa to improve clinical care and health outcomes for patients with HIV. The ongoing, five-country observational study, called Central Africa International Epidemiologic Databases to Evaluate AIDS (CA-IeDEA), involves more than 50,000 HIV-positive children and adults taking anti-retroviral therapy (ART).
One of the biggest challenges to discovering a cure for the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is when the disease becomes dormant — hidden and inactive within the human body. Modern therapy can practically wipe out the virus, but stores of latent HIV soon become active and multiply all over again.
After fully sequencing the latent HIV “provirus” genomes from 19 people being treated for HIV, scientists at Johns Hopkins Medicine report that even in patients who start treatment very early, the only widely available method to measure the reservoir of dormant HIV in patients is mostly counting defective viruses that won’t cause harm, rather than those that can spring back into action and keep infections going.
Whether an HIV-positive man has met cultural expectations of masculinity might impact how much stigma he experiences, according to a new study from Binghamton University, State University of New York.
Mike Kent, a researcher in Sandia National Laboratories’ Biological and Engineering Sciences Center, is studying a protein called Nef involved in HIV progression to AIDS with the ultimate goal of blocking it. He and his collaborators have developed a new hybrid method to study this HIV protein that compromises the immune system. The method also could work on many other proteins that damage cellular processes and cause diseases.
Research announced today at the 68th AACC Annual Scientific Meeting & Clinical Lab Expo demonstrates that a first-of-its-kind next-generation sequencing test can detect HIV drug resistance mutations that conventional tests fail to identify. This test could play a critical role in helping clinicians to optimize HIV treatment regimens, while also helping public health initiatives to minimize the development of global resistance to antiretroviral drugs.
Using cardiac CT scans, researchers found an association between higher inflammatory biomarkers and a significantly higher prevalence of coronary artery disease in men infected with HIV
Each year, 1.5 million women living with HIV become pregnant. Without effective treatment, up to 45 percent of HIV-infected mothers will transmit the virus to their child. In an effort to prevent HIV transmission to women and their children, researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill demonstrated the effectiveness of a new anti-HIV medication, EFdA, in pre-clinical animal models.
Researchers from the George Washington University published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine finding a way to regulate chronic toxoplasmosis, one of the most common parasitic diseases worldwide.
Ortho Clinical Diagnostics will present seven scientific posters on its assays and display six products at the 2016 American Association for Clinical Chemistry (AACC) annual meeting. Ortho’s posters will address a range of important tests, both marketed and in-development for clinical labs.
One of the main mysteries confounding development of an HIV vaccine is why some people infected with the virus make the desired antibodies after several years, but a vaccine can’t seem to induce the same response.
UofL’s Community Based Dental Partnership Program (CBDPP), is one of only 12 Ryan White CBDPP federally funded oral health programs in the United States, and the only one in Kentucky.
A study led by researchers at The Saban Research Institute of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) suggests that maternal HIV infection influences the microbiome of their HIV-uninfected infants. Their findings may account for some of the immunological and survival differences seen these children.
The first case of Alzheimer’s disease diagnosed in an HIV-positive individual will be presented in a poster session at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference 2016 in Toronto July 27. The finding in a 71-year-old man triggers a realization about HIV survivors now reaching the age when Alzheimer’s risk begins to escalate.
A team of researchers led by the University of Maryland, School of Public Health’s Dr. Mona Mittal, conducted an integrated HIV risk reduction intervention for a racially diverse group of economically-disadvantaged women with histories of intimate partner violence (IPV). This intervention resulted in a decrease in unprotected sex and an increase in safer sex communication among its participants. It is one of the few interventions to address the association between gender-based violence and risk of HIV acquisition among women.
A better understanding of HIV latency is the key to eradicating the virus researchers at the University of North Carolina and partner institutions write in a perspective in the journal Science.
To support a coordinated, innovative approach to the development of an AIDS vaccine, Texas Biomedical Research Institute scientists, together with an international coalition of experts, have received a grant for $23 million from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) of the National Institutes of Health. The goal of this program is to establish a vaccine approach that targets a frontline defense at the mucosa, while generating backup immune responses in the blood and tissues.
Programs to reduce the high risk of HIV infection among transgender people are urgently needed—but efforts are hindered by a lack of accurate information on HIV prevalence, HIV incidence, and specific risk factors facing this key population. A special supplement to JAIDS: Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes presents essential information to meet the challenges of HIV prevention in the transgender population. The journal is published by Wolters Kluwer.
Anti-HIV medications suppress the viral load of people living with HIV and provide durable protection against heterosexual transmission a study led by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found. Researchers found a 93 percent reduction of HIV transmission when the HIV-infected person started antiretroviral therapy or ART at a higher CD4 cell count.
Researchers from the UCLA AIDS Institute and Center for AIDS Research found that recently discovered potent antibodies can be used to generate a specific type of cell called chimeric antigen receptors, or CARs, that can be used to kill cells infected with HIV-1.
Prisoners and detainees worldwide have higher burdens of HIV, viral hepatitis and tuberculosis than the communities from which they come, and the regular cycling of infected people in and out of incarceration is worsening the epidemics both inside and outside of prison, new Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health-led research suggests.
As delegates gather in Durban, South Africa from July 19th to the 22nd for the 21st International AIDS Conference (2016), leading researchers from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health are available to evaluate pioneering studies emerging in HIV prevention and treatment, stigma, ethical issues, and minority health, and comment on the major issues facing the global response to HIV.
In Durban, ICAP is convening a pre-meeting event on July 16th-17th titled Nursing HIV 2016 on the state of nursing and global HIV and led by Dr. Susan Michaels-Strasser. For more details email: [email protected]
Researchers from the George Washington University have received a $28 million, five-year Martin Delaney Collaboratory grant from the National Institutes of Health to apply immunotherapy advances in order to create a novel HIV cure strategy.
Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will receive nearly $23 million over the next five years to continue research on their innovative “kick and kill” strategy for eradicating HIV.
Gay social and sexual networking app Grindr is an effective means through which to distribute HIV self-testing kits among men who have sex with men who have a high risk for contracting the virus.
A new study has found that neither gay men nor heterosexual people with HIV transmit the virus to their partner, provided they are on suppressive antiretroviral treatment.
Increasing the number of men who undergo circumcision and increasing the rates at which women with HIV are given antiretroviral therapy (ART) were associated with significant declines in the number of new male HIV infections in rural Ugandan communities, new Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health research suggests.
In a study appearing in the July 12 issue of JAMA, an HIV/AIDS theme issue, Lisa R. Metsch, Ph.D., of Columbia University, New York, and colleagues assessed the effect of structured patient navigation (care coordination with case management) interventions with or without financial incentives to improve HIV-l viral suppression rates among hospitalized patients with elevated HIV-1 viral loads and substance use.
Among nearly 900 serodifferent (one partner is HIV-positive, one is HIV-negative) heterosexual and men who have sex with men couples in which the HIV-positive partner was using suppressive antiretroviral therapy and who reported condomless sex, during a median follow-up of 1.3 years per couple, there were no documented cases of within-couple HIV transmission, according to a study appearing in the July 12 issue of JAMA, an HIV/AIDS theme issue.
In a report appearing in the July 12 issue of JAMA, an HIV/AIDS theme issue, Huldrych F. Gunthard, M.D., of University Hospital Zurich, Switzerland, and colleagues with the International Antiviral Society-USA panel, updated recommendations for the use of antiretroviral therapy in adults with established HIV infection, including when to start treatment, initial regimens, and changing regimens, along with recommendations for using antiretroviral drugs for preventing HIV among those at risk, including preexposure and postexposure prevention.