Results tagged “research” from AIDS & HIV

Feb. 15 (Bloomberg) -- To look at him, you wouldn't know Mark McClelland is dying.

McClelland, a ramrod-straight 6-foot-4 (1.9 meters), easily strides up the San Francisco hill to his house and tussles playfully with his golden retriever. While McClelland has a form of HIV that's overcome all seven drugs he now takes, he can smile because hope is on the horizon.

Pfizer Inc., Merck & Co. and others are in the final stages of developing drugs that offer unique ways to bar HIV from infecting human cells. For the 65,000 people in the U.S. whose virus, like McClelland's, is resistant to three or more drug types, the new therapies promise to spur the first revolution in care in a decade. The debut of combination therapy in 1996 doubled life expectancy for patients. This latest generation of treatments offers new options to hold off the opportunistic infections that occur when HIV leads to deadly AIDS.

Developed by Temple University researchers, 2-5AN6B could someday work as an effective treatment for HIV especially in conjunction with current drug treatments. Their work is published in the January issue of AIDS Research and Human Retroviruses.

A nucleic acid, 2-5AN6B inhibited HIV replication in white blood cells from a group of 18 HIV infected patients by up to 80 percent, regardless of the patients’ treatment regimens.

"A cure for HIV infection remains an elusive goal despite the significant impact of current treatments because of the virus’ ability to adapt to and resist those treatments, and bypass the immune system’s natural defenses," said Robert J. Suhadolnik, Ph.D., prinicipal investigator and professor of biochemistry at Temple University School of Medicine. "This compound prompts the body to restore its natural antiviral defense systems against the invading virus."

Current drugs for HIV work by blocking one of the steps toward virus replication.

Researchers have halted two studies of an anti-AIDS vaginal gel in Africa and India after early results suggested it might raise the risk of HIV infection instead of lowering it.

It was "a disappointing and unexpected setback" to efforts to get a simple tool to protect women from the risk of AIDS through sex, the World Health Organization said.

More than half of all new infections with the AIDS virus in Africa involve women and girls. Scientists and groups like the Gates Foundation have long sought a method of protection women could use, even without their partners' knowledge, since many men refuse to use condoms.

The studies were testing Ushercell, a gel containing cellulose sulfate, a cotton-based compound developed by Polydex Pharmaceuticals, based in Toronto.

AZUSA, Calif., Jan. 9 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Viral Genetics (OTC Bulletin Board: VRAL) has identified two key peptides involved in its thymus nuclear protein or "TNP" technology currently under development for the treatment of HIV/AIDS. The active components of VGV-1, Viral Genetics' lead drug candidate based on TNP, were discovered by independent research laboratories and additional studies to confirm these findings are currently underway.

The compounds identified include two classes of peptides (small protein fragments) that occur naturally in a variety of mammals, including humans. While both have been studied and reported in the scientific literature predominantly as markers, their therapeutic uses have not been actively pursued to date.

In published studies, one of the peptides has been characterized as an immune modulator, possibly possessing natural antiviral and anti-infective properties. Researchers have also identified an association between levels of this peptide and certain viral infections and cancers.

St. Paul, Minn. — An AIDS research program at the University of Minnesota is being forced to close after 20 years of running clinical trials. The National Institutes of Health has cut back on domestic research funding for HIV/AIDS, but plans to perform clinical trials in developing nations.

The Minnesota ACTU is one of eight programs whose research grants have not been renewed by the NIH.

Hank Balfour is the principal investigator of the Minnesota ACTU and the University of Minnesota's International Center for Antiviral Research and Epidemiology. He says other public health concerns, like avian flu or bioterrorism, may be perceived to be greater threats.

source - Minnesota Public Radio

HealthDay News -- Within a few weeks of being infected by HIV, most of a person's memory T-cells vanish and are not likely to return even after years of antiretroviral treatment, a new study finds.

Previous research has shown that HIV infection depletes memory T-cells -- which are mostly found in the intestinal tract -- within days. In contrast, T-cells circulating in the blood typically decline over several years, according to background information in the article.

It's known that T-cells in the blood can return to normal levels when HIV patients take antiviral drugs. But it wasn't clear whether intestinal memory T -cell levels returned to normal.

In this study, researchers at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York City and elsewhere performed intestinal biopsies on HIV patients who had started treatment shortly after they were infected.

Using hormonal contraception does not appear to increase women's overall risk of contracting the AIDS virus, according to a U.S. National Institutes of Health study published on Thursday.

The study, published on the Web site of the journal "AIDS," followed thousands of women in Africa and Asia and compared their patterns of contraceptive use to their risk of infection with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

"Understanding whether hormonal contraceptive use alters the risk of HIV acquisition among women is a critical public health issue," the study authors wrote.

Some 6,000 women, in Uganda, Zimbabwe and Thailand enrolled in the study were offered a choice of the most commonly prescribed forms of hormonal contraception, birth control pills or DMPA (depot-medroxyprogesterone acetate) injections, as well as condoms.

The US soy industry is supporting a new research project in South Africa to fill a gap in the data as to how soy protein supplementation could help people living with HIV and AIDS.

A balanced diet containing appropriate protein and other nutrients can help reduce the risk of poor outcomes and progression of disease. Since soy is a source of antioxidants and high quality protein, supplementation could prove a useful tool in helping ward off immune deficits, the researchers believe, and in turn help prevent opportunistic and other infections in people with HIV and AIDS.

NEW HAVEN, Conn., Nov. 14 (UPI) -- U.S. medical scientists suggest patients who are HIV positive may be at an increased risk for developing chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

The researchers from Yale University School of Medicine investigated the prevalence of COPD among 1,014 HIV-positive and 713 HIV-negative men enrolled in the Veterans Aging Cohort 5 Site Study.

Results showed the prevalence of COPD was 10 percent in HIV-positive and 9 percent in HIV-negative patients -- as reported by clinicians, and 15 percent and 12 percent, in that order, as indicated by patient self-reporting.

Houston, TX (AHN) - A recent study compiled by scientists at Baylor College of Medicine and University of Sheffield, U.K. revealed that consuming just two cups of green tea could block the advancement of HIV infection.

The study found that a substance in green tea, a major polyphenol called epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG) has the ability to block the HIV virus from attacking the immune system.

"For the study the researchers used nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to see what EGCG does to prevent HIV infection from progressing," Dr. Christina Nance, a Baylor pediatrics instructor, said.

The study published in the online edition of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.

source - AHN 

PARIS (AFP) - Gorillas appear to be widely infected by a close relation to the AIDS virus, according to a study that appears in the British journal Nature.

French scientists made the startling discovery -- which has wide implications for the illegal market in bushmeat -- as they were looking for traces of the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) among chimpanzees.

Chimpanzees have already been closely implicated in the origin of AIDS. The apes are believed to have initially spread SIV to Man, where the agent mutated into a form that adapted to a human host -- the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

Martin Peeters and Eric Delaporte of the Institute for Development Research (IRD) and the University of Montpellier, southern France, analysed more than 500 faecal samples deposited by chimps and gorillas in remote forests in Cameroon.

Antiretroviral therapy can keep HIV infection in check and delay and ameliorate the symptoms of HIV/AIDS. However, the drugs do not manage to eradicate the virus completely; individuals have to stay on the drugs permanently. Preclinical studies in mice by Ekatarina Dadachova and colleagues (Albert Einstein College of Medicine) published in the international open-access journal PLoS Medicine now suggest a new strategy to locate and kill many if not all HIV-infected cells in the body.

Radioimmunotherapy refers to an approach pioneered by cancer researchers in which patients are injected with antibodies against specific molecules characteristic of cancer cells (or in this case, HIV-infected cells) which carry a radioactive isotope. The approach takes advantage of the antibody's ability to rapidly hone in on its target cells and deliver the radioactive payload which then selectively kills the target cells and any HIV particles within it.