Two men Australian men ‘cured’ of
HIV after undergoing cancer treatment
In a discovery that raises hope for
AIDS cure, two Australian men have been found to be HIV-free after receiving
stem cells to treat cancer. The two patients’ virus levels became undetectable
after bone-marrow therapy with stem cells. They are still on antiretroviral
therapy (ART) ‘as a precaution’, but those drugs alone could not be responsible
for bringing the virus to such low levels, said David Cooper, director of the
Kirby Institute at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, who led the
discovery.
Cooper began searching for patients
who had been purged of the HIV virus after attending a presentation by a US
team last year at a conference of the International AIDS Society in Kuala
Lumpur. At that meeting, researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in
Boston, Massachusetts, reported that two patients who had received stem-cell
transplants were virus-free.
Cooper and his collaborators scanned
the archives of St Vincent’s hospital in Sydney, one of the largest bone-marrow
centres in Australia.
‘We went back and looked whether we
had transplanted [on] any HIV-positive patients, and found these two,’ said
Cooper. The first patient had received a bone-marrow transplant for non-Hodgkin’s
lymphoma in 2011.
His replacement stem cells came from
a donor who carried one copy of a gene thought to afford protection against the
virus. The other had been treated for leukaemia in 2012.
Because of the risk of relapse,
Cooper’s team will not claim that their patients are cured, ‘nature.com’
reported.
However, Cooper said the results
show that ‘there is something about bone-marrow transplantation in people with
HIV that has an anti-HIV reservoir effect, such that the reservoirs go down to
very low levels. And if we can understand what that is and how that happens, it
will really accelerate the field of cure search.’
Stem-cell transplant in itself
cannot be used as a routine HIV treatment, because of the high mortality (10
per cent) associated with the procedure, researchers said.
Source: www.thehealthsite.com
22.07.2014
Can we end HIV by 2030?
The opening session of the 20th
International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2014) began here Sunday with tributes being
paid to the six delegates who lost their lives aboard the Malaysian Airline
flight MH17 in Ukraine. A one-minute silence was observed in their honour at
the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre attended by officials from the
International AIDS Society and representatives from those organisations who
lost their colleagues in the air crash.
A candlelight vigil will be held
Tuesday at Federation Square in the heart of the city, said a statement from
the International AIDS Society. Michel Sidibe, executive director of UNAIDS,
said efforts to increase access to anti-retroviral therapy (ART) are working.
‘In 2013, an additional 2.3 million people gained access to the life-saving
medicines. This brings the global number of people accessing ART to nearly 13
million by the end of 2013,’ he informed the delegates at the opening session.
Based on recent scale-up, the UNAIDS estimates that as of July 2014, as many as
14 million people were accessing ART.
‘If we accelerate a scale-up of all
HIV services by 2020, we will be on track to end the epidemic by 2030,’ Sidibe
emphasised. ‘And if not, our risk would be significantly increasing the time it
would take, adding a decade, if not more,’ he warned. Addressing the gathering,
professor Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, the AIDS 2014 International Chair and
president of the International AIDS Society (IAS) said, ‘The tremendous
scale-up of HIV programmes has, for so many people, transformed HIV from a
death sentence into a chronically manageable disease.’
Nevertheless, these remarkable achievements
are still not enough as 22 million people still do not have access to
treatment, he noted. ‘We need to step up the pace and redouble our efforts. Too
many countries are still struggling to address their HIV epidemic with their
most vulnerable people consistently being left behind,’ Barre-Sinoussi added.
Some 12,000 participants across the
globe have gathered here for the conference under the theme titled ‘Stepping up
the Pace’. During the next five days, delegates will discuss latest research
developments and will hear about the status of the epidemic from world-renowned
experts. ‘AIDS 2014′ offers delegates a strong scientific programme with
presentations around key issues including HIV cure strategies and challenges
and HIV prevention.
Source: www.thehealthsite.com
22.07.2014
If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything
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