Should everyone have a month off sex?

Scientists fighting the Aids epidemic are calling on Africans to stop having sex for a month. They say it could cut new infections by almost half. According to their research a person with HIV is most likely to pass the on virus to somebody else during the 1st month after they've been infected.

One of the scientists, Alan Whiteside, thinks a month-long pledge to use a condom could also be effective.

But Elizabeth Mataka, the UN Secretary General's Special Envoy for AIDS in Africa says that abstinence is not an option for most married women because they have conjugal obligations to fulfil. She argues for new technologies to prevent infection, such as a ring women can wear in the birth canal which releases anti-retrovirals to block transmission - which is being trialled in Kenya at the moment.

Some worry an abstinence campaign could be viewed as moralistic, or that church could hijack the idea and use it to promote their ideals around marriage.

Abstinence certainly fits in with the view held by many in the church. The authors of a new book argue that getting people to abstain and be faithful is more important than the 'technical fix' of promoting condom use. They compare it to smoking:
Maybe once it seemed unrealistic to change a situation where 75% of people smoked, but public health authorities embarked on campaigns to change such lifestyle choices, with success.

And Charles R Swindoll also connects abstinence with marriage:

The problem of AIDS is horrible, but understanding the ultimate cause is not complicated. To borrow from the prophet Hosea (who knew the tragic consequences of sexual impurity), our land has sown the wind and we are now reaping the whirlwind. The storm will not subside unless we return to marital fidelity and sexual abstinence.

But Philip N Cohen thinks talking about marriage and abstinence can get in the way of trying to promote a health message. This blogger argues that education is crucial to fighting Aids. Elizabeth Pisani thinks that one weakness of abstinence programmes is that they are only meant to work until people get married, but people can be unfaithful after that. And Dr Ayiko says we need to use the law as an instrument to prevent people intentionally infecting others.

by Claudia Bradshaw
12:02 UK time,
Monday, 5 July 2010
source: BBC News

Thai Aids 'cure' declared useless

Public health officials in Thailand say a so-called "miracle cure" for Aids has been found to be useless - dashing the hopes of thousands of sufferers.
The V-1 Immunitor Pill was created by a Thai pharmacist, who claimed that it was the first cure for the deadly disease. It was given free in mass handouts to thousands of Aids patients.

"We want to point out that V-1 is merely a food supplement and it is not harmful to take, but I want to reaffirm that it's not a drug"
Public Health Minister Sudarat Keyuraphan.

But Deputy Public Health Minister Surapong Suebwonglee said that in fact the pill had no significant effect on Aids sufferers.
"From physical examinations and laboratory tests of Aids patients who have taken V-1 Immunitor, it can be concluded that the pill does not have any effect on the body's immune system, white blood cell count and amount of the virus in the blood," the minister said in a statement.

Thailand is grappling with one of the region's worst Aids problems,
with one in 60 of its population already infected.

Food supplement

The tests were carried out on 50 patients who had been taking the pill.
As a result, the government has ordered that the pill must now only be marketed as a food supplement.

"We want to point out that V-1 is merely a food supplement and it is not harmful to take, but I want to reaffirm that it's not a drug," said Public Health Minister Sudarat Keyuraphan.

But the government says it will test the patients again to verify the tests.
"Another examination and test should be conducted in the next two to four months," Mr Surapong said.
The results of the test were immediately challenged.
A Thai epidemiologist, Dr Orapun Mettadilokun, told the BBC's East Asia Today programme that he had carried out an independent study and found the drug to have a positive effect.

'Inconclusive'

The Salang Bunnag Foundation, a charitable organisation that has backed the pill and distributed it to thousands of people in Bangkok and the northern city of Chiang Mai, said the ministry's findings were inconclusive.

"We take it with a grain of salt, because they said they need to study it for a few more months," a spokesman for the foundation said.

"The data they received is a one-off, and it does not determine the efficacy of the product," he added.

The chairman of the foundation, former police general Salang Bunnag, also rejected the ministry's findings, saying an independent committee of government offices and his foundation should be established to test the pill.

Treating HIV also prevents its spread, study finds

The Associated Press
Provocative new research shows that treating people with the AIDS virus can provide a powerful bonus: It cuts the risk that they will infect others.
New infections plummeted in parts of Canada as more people went on AIDS drugs, which lowered the amount of virus they had and the chances they would spread it, the study found.

For every 100 people with HIV who started taking AIDS drugs, new infections dropped by 3% in British Columbia, where the study was done. The number of new infections there has been cut in half since 1996, matching a rise in treatment.

"The more people you put on therapy, the less transmission there is," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The drop in new cases in Canada "likely could not be explained by anything else," he said.

The U.S. government helped pay for the study. Results were published online Sunday by the British medical journal Lancet and were being presented at the International AIDS Conference in Vienna.

The results suggest that Canada's policy of free AIDS care is having a double benefit: to the people being treated and to the public's health.

In the United States, the study should boost efforts to more aggressively test and treat people, and to plug funding gaps that keep many from getting care now, AIDS experts said. An estimated 1.1 million Americans have HIV, and about 20% of them don't know it. About 55,000 new infections occur each year in the U.S., a number that has held steady for a decade.

Finding ways to prevent HIV infection is critical because there is no vaccine or cure for AIDS. Recommended treatment is a combination of medicines that lower the amount of virus that infected people harbor, often to undetectable levels.

A study a decade ago in Africa found that people with these very low levels of virus were less likely to infect others. Treating pregnant women with HIV lowers the amount of virus they have and the risk they'll pass it on to their babies.

The new study is the first clear evidence that the same principle holds true on a population level, in everyday community settings.

It was led by Dr. Julio Montaner, director of the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS in Vancouver.

Researchers used patient registries from British Columbia's universal health care system to track HIV tests, new cases, treatments and virus levels since 1996, when modern AIDS drugs became available.

The number of infected people getting treatment rose from 837 in 1996 to 5,413 in 2009. The number of new HIV diagnoses fell from 702 to 338 per year during that time. The amount of virus that patients harbored also dropped and was directly related to fewer new cases being diagnosed in the population.

The trends were largely driven by more treatment and fewer new cases among injection drug users, as sharing needles raises the risk of spreading HIV.

Rates of other sexually spread diseases rose during the study period, suggesting that safer sex behaviors were not responsible for the drop in new HIV infections — treatment was.

"There's an ethical imperative" to provide care to people with HIV, and finding that this helps prevention "is an added bonus," said Dr. Jonathan Mermin, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's AIDS prevention chief.

"It's not enough on its own to stop the epidemic" and must be combined with safe sex and other prevention strategies, he said.

Mitchell Warren, executive director of the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, a New York-based nonprofit group that has worked toward developing a vaccine and other prevention tools, said the study was "quite compelling" and "very strong evidence" that treatment cuts the risk of spreading infection.

Nearly every country, including the U.S., has waiting lines for people to get treatment, he noted. And progress with this approach depends on getting more people tested.

Aggressive efforts to test and quickly treat anyone found to have HIV are underway in Washington, New York and San Francisco. The National Institutes of Health also has a study underway in seven countries, including the United States, to see if HIV treatment helps prevent spread of the virus to an uninfected partner.

Posted 7/18/2010 7:52 AM
Source:
www.usatoday.com/news/health/2010-07-18-hiv-spread-study_N.htm

Herbs give hope in AIDS cure

By ABDULWAKIL SAIBOKO,
14th October 2010 @ 16:00,
Source: Daily News

TANZANIAN researchers are studying some local herbs said to be effective in suppressing multiplication of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), which trigger AIDS.

Researchers from the Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences (MUHAS) and Tanzania Commission for AIDS (TACAIDS) said the study which involved 500 patients and 18 traditional healers in Arusha and Dar es Salaam between 2003 and 2007 established the potency of some herbs.

The herbs are also said to be good in sustaining CD4 cells, which play a key role in establishing and maximising the immune system. Scientists say HIV attacks and gradually destroys the human immune system, leaving the host unprotected against infection.

It cannot, according to scientists, be spread through casual contact but instead it is contracted mainly through exposure to blood and blood products by sharing hypodermic needles or by accidental needle sticks, semen and female genital secretions or breast milk.

A Senior Research Fellow at MUHAS, Dr Zakaria Mbwambo, said: "I was the principal investigator in the research and we found out that herbals are good at sustaining CD4s and reducing viral load in the patients' blood."

Dr Mbwambo told a news conference that the study which was intended to be the first phase of a series of studies on the herbs has already cost 700m/-. He said more funds were needed for next phases that would include measures to ensure sustainable supply of the herbs, which he declined to disclose.

Dr Mbwambo also said some herbs needed improvement on their taste.

"We came to learn that some of the herbs are too bitter and hence unfriendly to users. Our second phase in this research will include finding out best ways of preparing these medicines, packaging and adding ingredients for users' comfort," he said.

He commended the recent move by the government to recognise the role of traditional healers through registration. He said traditional healers have talents that were vital in the society.

Meanwhile, a non governmental Organisation, African Aids Working Group (AAWG), has set aside 500m/- for research on HIV/AIDS traditional treatment.

The AAWG Chairman, Mr Hussain Mohammad, noted that the organisation in collaboration with some traditional healers is collecting facts on herbs and devising measures to ensure their sustainability.

"We are planning to establish a specialised hospital for HIV/AIDS patients and we will grow suitable medicinal plants, prepare drugs and administer them to patients," he said.

Bone marrow transplant possibly cured AIDS, doctors say

BERLIN (AP) —
An American man who suffered from AIDS appears to have been cured of the disease 20 months after receiving a targeted bone marrow transplant normally used to fight leukemia, his doctors said Wednesday.
While researchers — and the doctors themselves — caution that the case might be no more than a fluke, others say it may inspire a greater interest in gene therapy to fight the disease that claims 2 million lives each year. The virus has infected 33 million people worldwide.

BETTER LIFE: More on sexual health

Dr. Gero Huetter said his 42-year-old patient, an American living in Berlin who was not identified, had been infected with the AIDS virus for more than a decade. But 20 months after undergoing a transplant of genetically selected bone marrow, he no longer shows signs of carrying the virus.

"We waited every day for a bad reading," Huetter said.

It has not come. Researchers at Berlin's Charite hospital and medical school say tests on his bone marrow, blood and other organ tissues have all been clean.

However, Dr. Andrew Badley, director of the HIV and immunology research lab at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., said those tests have probably not been extensive enough.

"A lot more scrutiny from a lot of different biological samples would be required to say it's not present," Badley said.

This isn't the first time marrow transplants have been attempted for treating AIDS or HIV infection. In 1999, an article in the journal Medical Hypotheses reviewed the results of 32 attempts reported between 1982 and 1996. In two cases, HIV was apparently eradicated, the review reported.

Huetter's patient was under treatment at Charite for both AIDS and leukemia, which developed unrelated to HIV.

As Huetter — who is a hematologist, not an HIV specialist — prepared to treat the patient's leukemia with a bone marrow transplant, he recalled that some people carry a genetic mutation that seems to make them resistant to HIV infection. If the mutation, called Delta 32, is inherited from both parents, it prevents HIV from attaching itself to cells by blocking CCR5, a receptor that acts as a kind of gateway.

"I read it in 1996, coincidentally," Huetter told reporters at the medical school. "I remembered it and thought it might work."

Roughly one in 1,000 Europeans and Americans have inherited the mutation from both parents, and Huetter set out to find one such person among donors that matched the patient's marrow type. Out of a pool of 80 suitable donors, the 61st person tested carried the proper mutation.

Before the transplant, the patient endured powerful drugs and radiation to kill off his own infected bone marrow cells and disable his immune system — a treatment fatal to between 20 and 30% of recipients.

He was also taken off the potent drugs used to treat his AIDS. Huetter's team feared that the drugs might interfere with the new marrow cells' survival. They risked lowering his defenses in the hopes that the new, mutated cells would reject the virus on their own.

Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infections Diseases in the U.S., said the procedure was too costly and too dangerous to employ as a firstline cure. But he said it could inspire researchers to pursue gene therapy as a means to block or suppress HIV.

"It helps prove the concept that if somehow you can block the expression of CCR5, maybe by gene therapy, you might be able to inhibit the ability of the virus to replicate," Fauci said.

David Roth, a professor of epidemiology and international public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said gene therapy as cheap and effective as current drug treatments is in very early stages of development.

"That's a long way down the line because there may be other negative things that go with that mutation that we don't know about."

Even for the patient in Berlin, the lack of a clear understanding of exactly why his AIDS has disappeared means his future is far from certain.

"The virus is wily," Huetter said. "There could always be a resurgence."

source: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-11-12-aids-cure_N.htm

Magic Johnson combats AIDS misperceptions

By Steve Sternberg,
Source: USA TODAY

Call it the Magic Paradox. Fifteen years ago, L.A. Laker legend Magic Johnson announced he had AIDS and would retire from basketball. Today, Johnson, 47, looks so healthy some may question whether AIDS is the menace it was made out to be.
That's one of the myths Johnson says he will have to dispel if he's going to succeed in perhaps his most ambitious venture of all, a $60 million partnership with the drug firm Abbott that aims to cut AIDS rates among African-Americans by 50% in the next five years.

AUDIO: Johnson reflects on 15 years with HIV

"You can't take that attitude that you're going to be like Magic," says Johnson, who will launch the I Stand with Magic partnership at a World AIDS Day briefing in Los Angeles on Friday.

"Since I announced 15 years ago, hundreds of thousands of people have died of HIV/AIDS," he says. "There will be more people dying. The virus acts different in all of us. There's no certainty that if you get the virus, you're going to be OK."

In fact, if you're young and black, odds are that you won't be, statistics show. For the past six years, HIV has been the leading cause of death for blacks 25 to 44 years of age, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

For whites, HIV is the fifth-leading cause of death; for Hispanics, HIV ranks fourth. Although blacks make up about 15% of the U.S. population, they account for about 50% of all people in the United States who live with HIV.

Blacks account for almost half of new HIV diagnoses, a tide that is rising. Two-thirds of new infections among women occur in black women. "We've got to drive these numbers down," Johnson says.

Magic strategy

To reach that goal, Johnson and his I Stand with Magic partners will hold an HIV testing drive in 10 to 13 cities each year, sponsor educational programs and advertising, back grass-roots advocacy programs and provide scholarships for doctors willing to staff HIV/AIDS programs in the black community. Getting across the message isn't going to be easy. Despite his best intentions, Johnson can be part of the problem.

"Just last night, I did a seminar with a group of high school girls," Myisha Patterson, 25, national health coordinator for the NAACP, said Thursday. "I had them write down three things they knew about HIV/AIDS. Somebody wrote, 'There's a cure for AIDS. Look at Magic Johnson.' "

Johnson says he's anything but cured. He says he owes his well-being — and quite possibly his life — to the multidrug cocktail he takes everyday.

The drugs, GlaxoSmithKline's Trizivir and Abbott's Kaletra, are standard treatments used by many thousands of others infected with the AIDS virus, HIV.

Johnson can also credit luck and possibly the conditioning that comes from playing up to 100 heart-pounding NBA games a year.

The start of a crusade

The sad irony of the Magic Paradox is that Johnson has worked so hard to raise AIDS awareness among blacks. It had a huge impact on Nov. 7, 1991, when the man who led the Lakers to five NBA titles, called a news conference and said, "Because of the virus I have obtained, I will have to retire from the Lakers today."

At the time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had tallied about 200,000 full-blown AIDS cases in the United States, one-third of them among blacks. The CDC also reported that 57,879 people had tested positive for the AIDS virus at public clinics, 9,142 of them (16 percent) were heterosexual men and women with multiple sex partners.

Johnson vowed to fight the disease and to become a national spokesman on HIV. He urged young people to practice safe sex, and he pointed out that his plight illustrated beyond a doubt that HIV/AIDS wasn't only a gay disease: "Here I am saying it can happen to anybody, even me, Magic Johnson."

Johnson learned just how mortal he was Oct. 26, 1991.

A routine Associated Press story reported, "Without Magic Johnson, the Lakers lost their exhibition game to the Utah Jazz, 107-103, Friday night at the New Delta Center." The Lakers had attributed his absence to an undisclosed illness.

Shocking discovery

Recalling the events in an interview with USA TODAY, Johnson says team doctor Michael Mellman had summoned him back to Los Angeles without disclosing the reason for the call.

When Johnson arrived in Mellman's office, he got the shock of his life. "He begins to tell me, you know, I have HIV," Johnson says. "I never, ever thought that was what he was calling me back for."

Johnson had been tested as part of a routine examination for a life insurance policy.

He says the next two hours were among the toughest of his life. He worried about his wife, Cookie Kelly, who was two months pregnant, and Mellman couldn't offer much reassurance.

"As I got home," Johnson says, "I was just hoping and praying that she would stay with me. I think that was the main thing. ... As I told her I was HIV-positive she, of course, began to cry and asked me what that meant for (her) and the baby, which I couldn't tell her. But I told her I would understand if she wanted to leave me. You know, right at that time, she hit me so hard upside my head. And then she said, 'Hey, we're going to beat this together.' "

Five days later, Cookie's HIV test came back negative, Johnson says. "Then I started my own journey."

'The face of the disease'

Seeking guidance, the couple visited Elizabeth Glaser, the wife of actor Paul Michael Glaser and founder of the Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. Glaser was infected with HIV in 1981 through a blood transfusion and unwittingly infected her children. She was dying, but she offered words of comfort and asked for something in return.

"She told me you have to become the face of the disease," Johnson says.

His preseason bombshell made headlines worldwide. Phill Wilson, head of the Black AIDS Institute, was the AIDS coordinator for the city of Los Angeles at the time. He says Johnson's announcement shut down his switchboard. "It was the single most powerful event at the time to raise awareness about AIDS in black America," Wilson says.

Kenny Smith, then of the rival Houston Rockets who now works with Johnson on TNT's "Inside the NBA", says, "Before then, people were ostracized, in my estimation, for having the disease. Magic was the person, because his name reached far beyond sports, to make (HIV) acceptable, more a disease than a mark of shame."

The next three years were difficult ones. Johnson missed being on the court, and the side effects of AZT, the only drug available at the time, made it hard for him to exercise. He suffered "mood swings" as a result of the stresses in his life.

To honor his promise to Glaser, he unveiled the Magic Johnson Foundation, dedicated to AIDS-related research and outreach. He also agreed to join President George H.W. Bush's National Commission on AIDS, but his tenure was short because he felt the commission was ineffective. He chose instead to focus his AIDS work through the foundation.

Beyond celebrity

This year, alarmed at the spread of AIDS in the black community, he approached officials at Abbott, because he wanted to attack AIDS in churches and neighborhoods and schools.

His effort coincides with a broader push, launched at the International AIDS Conference in Toronto in August, to draw black leadership in every community into the AIDS fight. "The story of AIDS in America is a story of failed leadership," says Wilson, who is organizing that effort.

Longtime AIDS activists, such as Archbishop Carl Bean of Unity Fellowship Church in Los Angeles, say these leaders will have to take their AIDS war to the streets.

"Celebrity gets people's attention for the moment," he says. "What holds your attention is (what happens) where you live. If you're dealing with people who are impoverished, who might drink a little too much or use drugs and who aren't aware of what they're doing, these are the people we have to reach. If we're going to get to them, we have to get to people they'll listen to."

That's what Johnson has in mind. "We (blacks) make up over 50% of all new cases," he says. "We've got to change that. The only way we can do that is to really get on the ground."

Posted 11/30/2006 10:53 PM ET

Race for Cure: What Will Eradicate AIDS?

AIDS was first introduced to the world 25 years ago today,

with the publication of a report of a bizarre disease affecting gay men in

the United States

By ANDREA CARTER,
source: ABC News Medical Unit
June 5, 2006

Now, there are drugs that suppress -- but not cure -- the disease. Many other strides have been made, but the most anticipated treatment of all -- a vaccine -- is still nonexistent. In fact, scientists still have different ideas on how best to tackle the virus through medical research.

While the world hopes for an HIV vaccine with the polio vaccine's magnitude, the reality is that HIV is a different kind of virus and has been tricky to pin down, making a vaccine elusive.

"The virus is a kind of chameleon, hard to keep from getting into the door," said Julie Overbaugh, a member of the Human Biology Division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

The human immunodeficiency virus is made of genetic material, RNA, which invades cells. The virus essentially hijacks the cell, and uses its machinery to multiply and survive. The HIV virus mutates faster than most other viruses, making vaccine development challenging.

"No one has really found a way to develop a broadly protective vaccine against a virus that mutates at high frequencies," Overbaugh said.

For other diseases, vaccines are either made of dead or weakened copies of a virus. When given as an inoculation, those virus copies help the body's immune system create antibodies that fight and attack the live virus when it infects the body.

Early in the fight against AIDS, scientists hoped to develop an HIV vaccine so that the body could produce antibodies to fight the virus. They also looked at creating one vaccine that could target all types of HIV, but there are hundreds of HIV subtypes and that compounds the difficulty of making a vaccine.

"The vaccine field has not even tried yet to tackle the issue of dealing with a genetically variable virus, which in my view is the major issue," Overbaugh said.

So, this has meant scientists have needed to adapt and think differently to target the virus. About five years ago, researchers switched their focus to vaccines that increase the number of t-cells in the body rather than antibodies, said Larry Corey, head of the Infectious Disease Program at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

more information just click the tittle of this posting

After Long Scientific Search, Still No Cure for AIDS

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
Published: May 9, 2010
source: New York Times

Despite decades of effort, no magic bullet for AIDS has been invented.

The obstacles are huge. The virus mutates as fast in a day as a flu virus does in a year, but can also lie dormant indefinitely.

Since no one has ever been cured, there is no natural defense to mimic. And, since it attacks the CD4 cells that are the “fire alarms” of the immune system, vaccines that stimulate immunity may just give it more targets.

Even in wealthy countries, it can only be controlled; antiretroviral cocktails keep it from replicating. Patients are not cured, but may survive into old age.

With just four million people on treatment worldwide and donors balking at the idea of supporting 33 million or more, a miracle is needed. But none is on the horizon.

The latest failed vaccine trial, in Thailand, took six years. It may have temporarily protected a few participants, but even that required six shots spaced months apart. That is too complicated for places like rural Africa, where polio drives often fail, though they involve only a few pink drops in babies’ mouths. Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, who oversaw the Thai trial, said he saw “no chance” of a vaccine in the next few years and a “reasonable” chance of one in 20 years.

The quest for a vaginal microbicide is also stalled. Women need a product that is not messy and can be inserted secretly, because many men react furiously to any suggestion that they are infected.

Also, because many women want children, it must block a tiny virus without blocking sperm, which has been likened to stopping a million BBs streaming down a road while a fleet of Mack trucks breezes through.

Trials using sticky chemicals have proved futile. An early trial of a spermicide actually increased infections.

In July, results are due from a trial of a gel containing the antiretroviral drug tenofovir, which worked well in monkeys. It is expected to show neither a major breakthrough nor an utter failure, since, ethically, scientists would have had to stop the trial prematurely if preliminary results showed either trend.

Sharon Hillier, principal investigator for the Microbicide Trials Network, said she was still “hopeful” that such a gel, or a vaginal implant that released drugs slowly, would be ready some day.

“But,” Dr. Hillier said, “it’s going to be a long and difficult passage.”

Can Gene Therapy Cure AIDS?

There's a mantra in the AIDS field:
HIV infection can be managed with antiretroviral drugs, but it can't be cured. Now a small success in a new gene-therapy study suggests that it may be possible to derail the virus once and for all.

In a study published today in Science Translational Medicine, researchers from the City of Hope National Medical Center, a medical research institute in Duarte, California, describe how they removed immune stem cells from four cancer patients also infected with HIV, stitched in genes to outwit the virus, and transplanted the fortified cells back into the men. The genes have continued to work, albeit at extremely low levels, for up to 2 years. The altered stem cells also matured and, as hoped, diversified into different types of immune system cells that HIV infects. Ultimately, the researchers hope the anti-HIV genes can clear the virus or, failing that, render it harmless.

"It was a very carefully conducted study, and it's a proof of concept that it's doable," says Carl June, a medical oncologist who is conducting similar gene-therapy studies with HIV at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. "Stem cells until now have been very resistant to this approach."

As City of Hope's John Rossi, John Zaia, David DiGiusto, and colleagues describe in their new study, there is no evidence that the treatment helped any of the men control their HIV infections. But that wasn't the point: The men needed a stem-cell transplant to treat their non-Hodgkin's lymphomas, and the anti-HIV genes were like hitchhikers, introduced by the researchers to see how they'd fare. Importantly, no serious side effects surfaced, and the cancer in every patient has remained in remission.

Earlier clinical studies the group conducted with the same strategy made little headway, but now the researchers have overcome two key obstacles, says Rossi, a molecular geneticist. One is that they managed to stitch the anti-HIV genes into a high percentage of the appropriate stem cells. The other is that the cells lived for a long time. "If we could increase the number of modified cells by 10- or 100-fold, we might be able to stop the virus itself," says Rossi.

The approach essentially trains the body to make its own anti-HIV drugs and disables a key receptor the virus needs to establish new rounds of infection. To accomplish this feat, the researchers first removed immune stem cells from the patients and destroyed most of their remaining immune system with dangerous "ablative" therapy that is a standard part of the transplant procedure to treat the lymphoma. Then, in test-tube manipulations, the team added three genes to the immune stem cells' DNA: one that cripples the CCR5 receptor that HIV exploits to enter the cell (this mimics a successful transplant recently done in Berlin with a much discussed patient who apparently was "cured" of his HIV infection), and two others that disable viral genes and prevent HIV from copying itself. This makes it increasingly difficult for HIV to find new targets and mops up any new virus produced.

Rossi has several ideas about how to improve the experiment. As a safety feature, this study gave patients unmodified stem cells and ones tweaked with HIV genes. He and others believe the unmodified cells likely competed with the engineered ones for "space" and made it difficult for them to survive. "That puts the genetically modified stem cells behind the eight ball," says Rossi. In future experiments, he hopes to transplant only modified cells.

Rossi expects the field to continue to advance one step at a time. Although researchers pursuing a cure would ideally like to clear the body completely of HIV, that's an extremely high hurdle, as the virus can lie dormant for many years inside of chromosomes, undetected by the immune system and invulnerable to drugs. So a gene-therapy "success" at first might only be defined as a treatment that makes antiretroviral drugs unnecessary for several months or a few years, relieving patients of side effects like cardiac and neurological problems. "It would be a huge improvement in the treatment of the disease," he says.

June is more optimistic still. "Now it's just a problem of engineering, where we need to work out the details," June says. "I don't see any show stoppers."

Reputable research on curing AIDS

Activating resting immune cells
Many researchers believe the best hope for eradicating HIV infection lies in combining antiretroviral treatment with drugs that flush HIV from its hiding places. The idea is to force resting CD4 cells to become active, whereupon they will start producing new HIV particles. The activated cells should soon die or be destroyed by the immune system, and the antiretroviral medication should mop up the released HIV.

Early attempts to employ this technique used interleukin-2 (also known as IL-2 or by the brand name Proleukin). This chemical messenger tells the body to create more CD4 cells and to activate resting cells. Researchers who gave interleukin-2 together with antiretroviral treatment discovered they could no longer find any infected resting CD4 cells. But interleukin-2 failed to clear all of the HIV; as soon as the patients stopped taking antiretroviral drugs the virus came back again.1 2

There is a problem with creating a massive number of active CD4 cells: despite the antiretroviral drugs, HIV may manage to infect a few of these cells and replicate, thus keeping the infection alive. Scientists are now investigating chemicals that don’t activate all resting CD4 cells, but only the tiny minority that are infected with HIV.

One such chemical is valproic acid, a drug already used to treat epilepsy and other conditions. In 2005 a group of researchers led by David Margolis caused a sensation when they reported that valproic acid, combined with antiretroviral treatment, had greatly reduced the number of HIV-infected resting CD4 cells in three of four patients. They concluded that:

“This finding, though not definitive, suggests that new approaches will allow the cure of HIV in the future.”3
Sadly, it seems such optimism was premature; more recent studies suggest that valproic acid has no long term benefits.4 5 In fact it’s quite possible that all related approaches are flawed because the virus has other hiding places besides resting CD4 cells. There is a lot about HIV that remains unknown.

Bone marrow transplants and gene therapy
In November 2008, a pair of German doctors made headlines by announcing they had cured a man of HIV infection by giving him a bone marrow transplant.6 The transplant - given as a treatment for leukemia - used cells from a donor with a rare genetic mutation known as Delta 32 that confers resistance to HIV infection. Twenty months after the procedure researchers reported they could find no trace of HIV in the recipient's bone marrow, blood and other organ tissues.

Other experts have said that more tests are required to verify this cure claim,7 though it is not the first of its kind. Of more than thirty HIV positive patients given bone marrow transplantation prior to 1996, two appeared to have been cured of their infection based on molecular testing and post-mortem biopsy samples.8 9

Even assuming it can be effective, bone marrow transplantation is too dangerous and costly for widespread use as a cure. Many patients die as a result of chemotherapy or reactions to the transplant, which is usually a last resort in treating life-threatening diseases. As Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, put it:

“It’s very nice, and it’s not even surprising. But it’s just off the table of practicality.”10
Nevertheless the German transplant does raise hope for related approaches. If scientists can find another way - such as gene therapy - to confer the same sort of protection against HIV as Delta 32 provides, then they may be able to stop the virus replicating. Research in this area is in its very early stages; it may be many years before a useful treatment is found, if at all.

Hope for the future

Some of the world’s top research institutions are currently engaged in studies to learn more about infected resting CD4 cells and the behaviour of HIV. But the truth is that this field does not receive a lot of funding. Of the $1.54 Billion spent by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) on AIDS in 2009, only $40 million was spent on AIDS cure research.11 This represents only 3 percent of the total NIAID AIDS budget.

Yet there are still those who remain hopeful, including activist Martin Delaney who is among those calling for an end to defeatism:

“Far too many people with HIV, as well as their doctors, have accepted the notion that a cure is not likely. No one can be certain that a cure will be found. No one can predict the future. But one thing is certain: if we allow pessimism about a cure to dominate our thinking, we surely won’t get one… We must restore our belief in a cure and make it one of the central demands of our activism.”12

Scientist believe they found a cure for AIDS/HIV

July 4th, 2010
3:21 pm ET.

The South Florida Community dispensing care, treatment and prevention of the AIDS/HIV disease as well as patients got heartening news today as scientists managed to create cells in mice immune to the virus. If these cells can be developed in humans, the pathogen would be controllable

U.S. Experts have discovered a way to avoid HIV infection, a fact that would prevent further spread of the AIDS pandemic, according to a study published in the journal "Nature Biotechnology". Currently, there are over 33 million people in the world infected with HIV/AIDS who, so far, have not found treatment to cure it.


Experts from the University of Southern California explained in the report how they managed to create cells in mice immune to the virus causing the disease. They reported that if these cells could be developed in humans, the pathogen will be con controlled, Prensa Latina revealed today on its Website.

The protein in question, the CCR5 receptor, is a surface of white blood cells that HIV uses to infect cells. Some time ago it was determined that people with a mutation in that cells are more resistant to infection.
Hence, the modifying, implanted cells would control the condition, which was found in rodents used in the test, but it is yet to be demonstrated if the same results be obtained in humans

"The challenge now is to apply the same method in humans , which would open the way to generate a virus -resistant proteins that can produce HIV -resistant cells in all the counterparts it infects" , said Paula Cannon director of The US Labor Department.

We hope and trust we are at the dawn of a significant breakthrough period for finding a cure to such a deadly disease as AIDS/HIV. Have a full recovery soon, South Florida AIDS patients.