HIV/AIDS Awareness. A father’s choice.

Archive for the ‘Breakthroughs’ Category

It is not just another ribbon on a lapel or people marching to raise awareness of a particular issue or disease. HIV Vaccine Awareness Day is about volunteers and community support for vital vaccine trials. Save the date on Sunday, May 18th and learn about the vaccine.

Without volunteers in the clinical trials, an HIV vaccine will not happen.

Finding a safe and effective vaccine to prevent the spread of HIV is our best hope for stopping the AIDS epidemic.  In addition, there are complementary strategies to curb the spread of HIV including the use of microbicides, male circumcision, blood supply screening, and the use of clean syringes and condoms.

Multiple clinical trials are also taking place to determine whether giving antiretroviral therapy (ART) to HIV-negative people is an effective means of preventing infection. The question remains would you take the drugs to prevent infection?

Until we have a vaccine. these strategies are our only hope against HIV infection. But right now, we are not winning this war.

Results were released from an AIDS vaccine phase III trial in Thailand, which showed – for the first time – that the risk of HIV infection can be reduced by a vaccine.  This study was the largest AIDS vaccine trial to date, with over 16,000 participants. It indicated that the vaccine regimen reduced HIV risk by approximately 30 percent.

But much more research must be done.

There remains a great deal of misunderstanding about HIV vaccine research. The success of HIV vaccine studies depends on the understanding, trust, support, and participation of communities across the country. It depends on people volunteering to be part of several ongoing clinical trials.

How can you help? You can play a part in the search for an HIV vaccine by educating yourself and others about HIV vaccine research. There is a great deal of information about the HIV vaccine and clinic trials at http://bethegeneration.nih.gov/.

If you are interested, The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), has opened enrollment in HVTN 505, an exploratory HIV vaccine clinical study examining whether a two-part vaccine regimen can decrease viral load in study participants who later become infected with HIV. HVTN 505 is taking place in 12 U.S. cities and is enrolling 1,350 HIV-negative men ages 18 to 45 years who have sex with men.

You can find information about this new study at http://hopetakesaction.org.

I’ve put links to the fact sheets provided by the National Institutes of Health on our new Info Center at http://myhivaidsawareness.com. We will also have more information in the coming weeks in our weekly HIV Living Without Limitations e-newsletter. You can sign up for HLWL in the right column on this page.

I was reading over reports from the briefing held just over a week ago by a host of prominent HIV/AIDS organizations including amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research; AVAC; HIV Medicine Association; IDSA/HIVMA Center for Global Health Policy; the San Francisco AIDS Foundation; and the Treatment Action Group.

The keynote speaker was Anthony Fauci, MD, director, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health.

I like to look at the positive first, so let me share a bit about what they found was working for us right now. “More than 30 effective antiretroviral drugs are approved for use in HIV/AIDS, and these have “totally transformed the lives of HIV-infected individuals,” Dr. Fauci said. “We went from a 26-week lifespan to a 40-year-plus life span” for those infected with the virus in the past 15 years.

Of concern is that for every person who started on antiretroviral therapy in 2008, 2 to 3 people were infected with HIV. “We are not winning the game,” he said.

According to Dr. Fauci, we can reach our goal of controlling and ending the HIV/AIDS pandemic by focusing on three areas: scaling up delivery of proven therapies, curing existing infections, and preventing new infections. He feels that our greatest hope is a “functional cure,” in which HIV patients are treated early and aggressively and then go into permanent remission where the virus no longer replicates.

Dr. Fauci went on to say an additional strategy for preventing new infections was “critical” and “eminently feasible.” This strategy includes use of microbicides, male circumcision, blood supply screening, and the use of clean syringes and condoms.

But there have been devastating failures in reaching our goal of creating a vaccine that will prevent infection. “Last year for the first time we had the first signal of a success in a vaccine trial,” Dr. Fauci said. Much more research must still done.

It seems that we remain in the position where individual behavior is our primary weapon for prevention. We can provide the tools that assist with prevention, but they must be used.

As Dr. Fauci says, there may be an impression “that we really have our arms around this and that things are stable and they are not.”

Our science has brought us to the point of creating what can be described now as a chronic disease, but not to the point of curing it or truly preventing it. Stunning successes mixed with devastating failures – very much like a life spent living the battle of HIV.

Last week, scientists at Johns Hopkins University made a startling announcement.

The common and  inexpensive antibiotic known as minocycline has been used to treat acne. Researchers found it effectively targets infected immune cells where HIV lies dormant and prevents them from reactivating and replicating.

Minocycline can be used in combination with a standard drug therapy we know as HAART (Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy), according to this new research published online and appearing in April 15, 2020 edition of  The Journal of Infectious Diseases.

“The powerful advantage to using minocycline is that the virus appears less able to develop drug resistance because minocycline targets cellular pathways not viral proteins,” says Janice Clements, Ph.D., Mary Wallace Stanton Professor of Faculty Affairs, vice dean for faculty, and professor of molecular and comparative pathobiology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in their press release.

She went on to say that the big challenge for doctors is to keep the HIV in a dormant state and minocyline is another arm of the defense against HIV.

To read more about this new breakthrough, please go to http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/Press_releases/2010/03_18a_10.html.

It is true… a potent new HIV inhibitor derived from bananas may open the door to new treatments to prevent sexual transmission of HIV says the University of Michigan Medical School study published this week.

Scientists are taking a closer look at lectins, naturally occurring chemicals in plants, because of their ability to halt the chain reaction that leads to a wide array of infections. In this case, the banana lectin (BanLec) binds to a key HIV-1 protein opening the door to developing compounds that can prevent sexual transmission of HIV.

Sound a little far-fetched? It should be noted that drugs ranging from Quinine (used to treat malaria) to Taxol (an anti-tumor agent) are derived from plants.  Certainly we can’t forget that the powerful pain medication morphine comes from a plant.

The U-M team noted that some of the most promising compounds for inhibiting HIV transmission are agents that block the virus prior to integration into its target cell.

Michael D. Swanson, a doctoral student in the graduate program in immunology at the University of Michigan Medical School and lead author of the study, said “the problem with some HIV drugs is that the virus can mutate and become resistant, but that’s much harder to do in the presence of lectins.”

Therapies using BanLec could be cheaper to make than current anti-retroviral medications and BanLec may provide a wider range of protection. It works through a self-applied microbicide compound.

The authors of this study say that even a modest success with BanLec could save millions of lives. In a time of shrinking budgets for anti-retrovirals, the banana may truly hold promise for preventing infection.

So let’s hear it for one of our favorite fruits.

“On a traffic light green means go and yellow means yield, but on a banana it’s just the opposite. Green means hold on, yellow means go ahead, and red means where the hell did you get that banana at…”
~Mitch Hedberg

Many patients diagnosed with HIV today will have normal life expectancies, two European studies have found.

The studies were presented at the 17th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) found that certain groups of patients including those diagnosed recently and some patients with high CD4 counts when they begin treatment – will have normal or near to normal life expectancies.

In the first study done in the Netherlands, for a patient diagnosed at the age of 25 their life expectancy came to 52.7 years. This means they would die, on average, at the age of 77.7. There was relatively no difference to the life expectancy for 25 year olds in the overall Dutch population which was 53.1 years.

The study known as ATHENA is a long-term national observational study that has been following HIV positive people in the Netherlands since the introduction of combination Anti-Retroviral Therapy (ART)

The researchers noted, “The life expectancy of asymptomatic HIV-infected patients who are still treatment-naive and have not experienced [an HIV or AIDS-defining symptom] at 24 weeks after diagnosis approaches that of age and gender-matched uninfected individuals.”

It is important to note that the follow-up time in the study was short and that the predictions are dependent on ART treatment continuing to work. It is worth emphasizing that this study also excluded late-diagnosed patients.

In the second study performed in France in 2005, a similar result was reported.

In a time when we are concerned about the cost and support for continuing ART treatment, these studies reinforce the importance of early diagnosis and continued therapy.

To read more about these studies and how they were conducted, please read:

http://www.aidsmap.com/en/news/507F3477-660B-4D89-8527-DD915A1B339D.asp