Long Languishing in Shadow of the Antiviral Quick Fix, Immune Based Therapies Are Called to Center Stage How to refortify the immune system The twilight of eradication may herald a new dawn for HIV immunology research, which has been largely…
CDC/Thai Vertical Transmission Results Silence Critics and Pave Way for Prevention of Millions of Infections Worldwide But who will bear the cost? Four years ago, results of ACTG 076 showed that HIV-infected pregnant women treated with a complex regimen of…
Tantalizing Research Paper Contemplates The Restoration of HIV-Specific 'T-Help' After HAART ‘An argument for immediate therapy?’ The hallmarks of HIV infection and AIDS are a gradual deterioration of the immune system and the subsequent development of opportunistic infections that debilitate…
Laboratory Purists and Renegade Empiricists Duke It Out Over How to Proceed with Vaccine Development Efforts Current Products ‘Certain to Fail’ Although significant scientific hurdles continue to impede progress toward the development of an ideal HIV vaccine candidate, a number…
As All the World Drools Over Triple HAART Hype, Low Key Dual Combo Appears First to Achieve the Unimaginable The first cure? In a recent issue of Nature Medicine, a group of immunologists make two obvious but rarely discussed observations…
Infectious HIV Persists After Up to 2 1/2 Years of Triple Drug Therapy, Due to a Non-Decaying 3rd Compartment Its the immune system after all. Can HIV be eradicated from a human host? Can currently available combination therapy approaches eliminate…
Just When You Thought the Global HIV/AIDS Picture Couldn't Get Any Worse -- It Did What could a vaccine do? As people in the North America, Western Europe and Australia begin to live longer with HIV and AIDS (and even…
David Ho proposes immunotherapeutic vaccination to help the immune system clear the long-lived "3rd" compartment of HIV-infected cells. These latently infected CD4+ T-cells with integrated HIV DNA currently represent the greatest obstacle to the potential eradication of HIV infection. And…
Three New Antivirals Trickle From the Pipeline, But Will They Provide Any Benefit for Those Who Need Them Most? Whose needs served? A group of new anti-HIV therapies are about to enter expanded access programs, but heavily pre-treated patients aren't…
The FDA's Oncologic Drug Advisory Committee Decides the Fate of Two Drugs for AIDS-Related Malignancies ‘Nowhere near bowled over’ On June 23rd, the FDA's Oncologic Drug Advisory Committee held a hearing to determine the fate of Bristol Myers-Squibb's supplemental new…