HIV/AIDS

For public health workers, it’s no surprise that social, economic and political conditions shape the distribution and burden of disease. They’ve always known that it takes much more than medicine to keep people healthy. Still, when public health scientist Kristina Talbert-Slagle decided to study the impact of social and public health spending on HIV/AIDS, she wasn’t sure what she’d uncover. “We thought that maybe there would be a connection, but we didn’t really know what to expect,” said Talbert-Slagle, a senior scientific officer at the Yale Global Health Leadership Institute and a lecturer…

I know I must be getting older because of Friday nights. I also know that I'm getting older because (1) there was no new post yesterday and (2) even today this post will look familiar to a significant number of our readership. Mea culpa, but trying to put the finishing touches on two R01 grants I've been working on takes a toll. Who knew? Things should get back to normal tomorrow or Friday at the latest. Be that as it may, let's get back to Fridays. After a long, hard week (and, during grant season, in anticipation of a long, hard weekend of more of the aforementioned grant writing), it's not…

ERV-->TMZ? No, this is an education and outreach opportunity, and I want to use it to the best of my ability as an HIV researcher. 1-- I am so glad Charlie Sheen got tested for HIV. Most people who should be, dont, because even faced with a treatable, deadly disease, denial is *incredibly* attractive. 'If I dont know, then it cant be real' is a tall hurdle *many* of us will have to clear for some reason, at some point in our lives. Sheen got tested, and that is the first step to stopping HIV. 2-- "I have to... I have to. I am here to admit, in fact, I am HIV positive." *wince* 'Coming out…

So the guy who faked some HIV research results is officially going to spend about five years in jail, and has to pay back $7 million. Former ISU scientist's stiff fraud sentence sends message Yeah. It does send a message. The message is "The US government is not going to really investigate any of this, but every now and then we are going to go after some random nobody 'to send a message'". My opinion on this topic has not changed in a year. Oh! Thank god someone finally did something about that tyrant assistant professor from Iowa who fucked up, got caught, admitted what he did, and showed…

You all know me. There are two things I really love: Studying HIV Using viruses for gene therapy One would think I would be over-the-moon about the FDA approving human trials for a gene therapy to stop HIV. HIV! Gene therapy! YAY!! With HIV Cure as the Goal, Gene Therapy Research Expands When this line of research initially emerged, I WAS super excited: GMO in GMOs used to make GMO cells to treat HIV Go read that. Now, just to be clear, that was in no way a 'functional cure'. No one in that small trial was 'functionally cured'. But I still thought it was a great, creative step in a positive…

New, weird, out-of-left-field, ideas-- we need them to stop HIV. This one makes sense, in retrospect, but I wouldnt have thought to try what these folks did: Targeting α4β7 integrin reduces mucosal transmission of simian immunodeficiency virus and protects gut-associated lymphoid tissue from infection Background info: HIV loves to rip through CD4+ T-cells in gut-associated lymphoid tissue. Early in infection, HIV tears those cells up, and anything HIV doesnt kill, it digs in as a latent reservoir to pop out more babby viruses later. Doesnt matter if you ultimately take anti-retrovirals, the…

For some reason, pop news became enamored with this paper last month (unfortunately while I was away at a conference): HIV infection en route to endogenization: two cases Inexplicable media frenzy-- Scientists find mechanism for spontaneous HIV cure French scientists find genetic mechanism by which two men were spontaneously cured of HIV. HIV discovery offers new lead in finding cure I have a lot of problems with this paper. Starting with the first sentence. The long-term spontaneous evolution between humans and the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is not well characterized. "Spontaneous…

I write about lots of things on ERV, but I didnt anticipate ever getting to the point where I can write new blog posts on new publications by cutting and pasting from old blog posts on old papers... Lots of news outlets have been talking about this new paper: Impact of HLA-driven HIV adaptation on virulence in populations of high HIV seroprevalence Ive covered the themes of this paper several times in the past. 1-- Some people progress to AIDS after HIV infection, some dont, or do so slowly. One of the reasons why one person might not progress to AIDS would be their particular MHC Class I…

You get the data when you get the data, but the information we get from this study would have been useful several years ago: Persistence of Virus Reservoirs in ART-Treated SHIV-Infected Rhesus Macaques after Autologous Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplant The Berlin Patient-- Guy gets HIV, develops a blood cancer, gets radiation and chemo for the cancer, a bone marrow transplant from someone who lacks the CCR5 receptor-- one of the co-receptors HIV prefers to use to infect our cells. Years later, he is still HIV free. How did this procedure work? The factors thought to be involved in the…

For quite a while, now, there has been a connection between Endogenous Retroviruses and HIV. For some unknown reason, some of the young ERVs in humans, the ones that can still code for a protein here and there, are reactivated in HIV+ patients. Scientists have found ERV RNA in HIV+ patient plasma, and they have even found cytotoxic T-cells that target ERV proteins. HIVs controlled by HERVs This lead some scientists to believe that maybe, maybe, ERVs could be a good target for an anti-HIV therapy. HIV changes a lot. It is really hard to train your immune system to fight it. ERVs are 'human',…

This is not, in any way, a 'clean' blog. But I cannot type my genuine reaction to this news: Shift of HIV Tropism in Stem-Cell Transplantation with CCR5 Delta32 Mutation I have not stopped cussing since I heard about this. God dammit, HIV. God DAMMIT. We had ONE THING. ONE THING that WORKED to CURE HIV. And it has been taken away, in a very big way. *sigh* A long time ago in a galaxy far far away, we cured one man of HIV infection (more, more, more). You might know him as 'The Berlin Patient'. Long story short, he got a blood cancer, got a bone marrow transplant from someone who was…

Ive written about modifying plants to do lots of fun things (vaccines, counter allergies, etc) in the past: Green our vaccines! Green our vaccines! Part II Green our vaccines! Part III Green our vaccines! Part IV Unfortunately, this kind of technology has been held back by luddite/anti-biotechnology pressure from the general public. It has *not* moved forward as much as it could have: About 15 years ago, it was thought that genetically engineered crops would be widely used to produce human proteins for use as drugs. When Dr. Whaley and Dr. Zeitlin (the scientists behind the anti-Ebola therapy…

"HIV mutates a lot". People 'get' that. Why is HIV hard to stop? Why is HIV hard to treat? "HIV mutates a lot". But HIV does not mutate willy-nilly. It mutates at an evolutionarily defined rate. The reverse transcriptase enzyme makes mistakes during replication that are beneficial to HIV-- creating a diverse population, a quasispecies, that can 'answer' the multitude of evolutionary 'problems' the population faces. A homogeneous population would be wiped out by a particularly efficient antibody, or a targeting drug, but a diverse population means that somewhere in a population of billions,…

Some of you might remember the waves made earlier this year about 'The Immunity Project'. They were crowdsourcing an HIV vaccine that was magical and amazing and they were totally going to give it away for free!! YAY! ... Except 'The Immunity Project' basically had nothing to back their claims up. No publications, the investigators had no connection to HIV vaccine research, and the marketing claims made by 'The Immunity Project' were outlandish (more from Skeptical Raptor). We were assured that a publication was in the works, and to their credit, that publication is now available in a peer-…

Though ERVs are my favorite tool vs Creationists, HIV is a fantastic choice as well. I mean, has anyone seen hide or hair of Behe since 2007? Poor guy. Alas, there are still Creationists out there, so to address some of their 'concerns', c0nc0rdance made a couple of vids using his favorite HIV protein, Vpr:

Of course, SciBlogs is in the middle of a Wordpress update when this news breaks: 'Mississippi Baby' now has detectable HIV, researchers find Some of you might remember last year, when there was exciting news about a baby, born with HIV, who had subsequently become HIV- thanks to an alternative treatment strategy (basically, give babby HAART ASAP). The end of last year, the physicians associated with the babby finally published some of their observations. This led to a rush of 'Me too!' physicians, either trying the same approach, or reporting on their previous HAART attempts. Theres nothing…

Quick recap-- An HIV Denier, Clark  Baker, starts a web group, the 'HIV Innocence Project' to defend people accused of HIV-related crimes. Name-change to 'HIV Innocence Group' after the Innocent Project complained. An HIV advocate, Todd Deshong, started a different website, 'HIV Innocent Group Truth' to address and expose Clarks activities. DeShongs coverage is rather innocuous-- What cases is Baker involved in? To what extent? What is the attack-angle Baker is providing to the accused/defense team? Here is an example I picked at random from 2011. I have said much more aggressive things about…

Ideally, everyone should be tested for HIV and in fact, federal guidelines introduced in 2006 recommend routine HIV screening for all patients. In reality, however, only about half of U.S. adults have ever been tested for HIV and about half of the 50,000 new infections that happen every year in the U.S. are transmitted by people who are unaware of their HIV status. Such statistics recently led a group of researchers to ask if there’s a more efficient way to go about curbing the HIV epidemic. “We strongly support the concept of universal testing and treatment to limit or control the spread of…

Remember this? Wait, what? Faked HIV vaccine results The researcher accused of manipulating his reagents to 'show his HIV vaccine strategy worked' admitted he did it: Investigators say former Iowa State University laboratory manager Dong-Pyou Han has confessed to spiking samples of rabbit blood with human antibodies to make an experimental HIV vaccine appear to have great promise. And the government is prosecuting him for it: Responding to a major case of research misconduct, federal prosecutors have taken the rare step of filing charges against a scientist after he admitted falsifying data…

Well, you cant say Brian Dunning doesnt put his money where his mouth is when it comes to his skepticism about homeopathy: I’ve been speaking with lab managers, AIDS researchers, and doctors about my plan to make a documentary short film about drawing blood from an HIV-positive patient, properly making a 30C homeopathic dilution of it using safe, legal laboratory procedures, and then drinking it. :-/ From a statistical standpoint, his risk of acquiring HIV from his proposed method is low. Assuming he found someone to 'donate' HIV that was at acute infection or end-stage AIDS, the highest…