HIV/AIDS

Scientists identify potential drug to block AIDS

Scientists have identified an existing anti-inflammatory drug that in laboratory tests blocked the death of immune system’s cells which occurs as an HIV infection leads to AIDS.

Researchers are planning a Phase 2 clinical trial to determine if this drug or a similar drug can prevent HIV-infected people from developing AIDS and related conditions.

Scientists at the Gladstone Institutes identified the precise chain of molecular events in the human body that drives the death of most of the immune system’s CD4 T cells as an HIV infection leads to AIDS.

Two separate journal articles, published simultaneously in Nature and Science, detailed the research from the laboratory of Warner C Greene, who directs virology and immunology research at Gladstone, an independent biomedical-research nonprofit based in San Francisco.

His lab’s Science paper revealed how, during an HIV infection, a protein known as IFI16 senses fragments of HIV DNA in abortively infected immune cells.

This triggers the activation of the human enzyme caspase-1 and leads to pyroptosis, a fiery and highly inflammatory form of cell death.

As revealed in Nature paper, this repetitive cycle of abortive infection, cell death, inflammation and recruitment of additional CD4 T cells to the infection “hot zone” ultimately destroys the immune system and causes AIDS.

Nature paper further described laboratory tests in which an existing anti-inflammatory inhibits caspase-1, thereby preventing pyroptosis and breaking the cycle of cell death and inflammation.

“Gladstone has made two important discoveries, first by showing how the body’s own immune response to HIV causes CD4 T cell death via a pathway triggering inflammation, and secondly by identifying the host DNA sensor that detects the viral DNA and triggers this death response,” said Robert F Siliciano, a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

Once the scientists discovered how CD4 T cells die they began to investigate how the body senses the fragments of HIV’s DNA in the first place, before alerting the enzyme caspase-1 to launch an immune response in the CD4 T cells.

They also identified that reducing the activity of a protein known as IFI16 inhibited pyroptosis.

“This identified IFI16 as the DNA sensor, which then sends signals to caspase-1 and triggers pyroptosis,” said Kathryn M Monroe, the Science paper’s other lead author, who completed the research while a postdoctoral fellow at Gladstone

Source: Times of India

70,000 HIV cases detected in China since January

Around 70,000 new HIV cases were reported in China in the first nine months of the year, bringing the total number of people living with HIV/AIDS to 434,000.

From January to September, 80.7 million people received tests for HIV, an increase of 8.9 percent from the same period last year, reported Xinhua citing a National Health and Family Planning Commission statement.

A total of 3,413 treatment organisations were set up in 31 provincial-level regions.

China tested 7.43 million pregnant women for HIV/AIDS in the first nine months of the year to prevent possible mother-to-child transmission, the statement said.

Source: Two circles

 

Children at risk of AIDS should be tested at birth: UN

More than a quarter of a million children each year are born infected with the virus that causes AIDS, but too few are being tested early to receive treatment and prolong their lives, the United Nations said on Wednesday.

Michele Sidibe, executive director of UNAIDS, called for diagnostic kits to be improved for detection in babies of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) that causes AIDS, and for their “still high” current price of $25-50 to be brought down.

Children are the “forgotten” victims of the AIDS epidemic, yet 260,000 babies joined their ranks last year, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, he said.

“Irrespective of the market size we need to make sure that diagnostics are made available for children,” he told a news conference in Geneva ahead of World AIDS Day on December 1.

“We made a lot of progress during the last 2-3 years in terms of treatment, in terms of medicines, in terms of making sure that the molecules are more well-targeted for children. But where we are failing is also making early diagnostics.”

U.S.-based Abbott Laboratories and Swiss drugmaker Roche are among the main manufacturers of HIV diagnostics, according to senior UNAIDS officials.

Some 3.3 million children under age 15 have HIV, but only 1.9 million of them require treatment today, according to the Geneva-based agency. Fewer than 650,000 or 34 percent of the 1.9 million received antiretroviral AIDS drugs in 2012, still a rise of 14 percent from the year before, it said.

Some 14 million adults with HIV need treatment, and 9 million of them or 64 percent are receiving it, a far higher coverage rate than for children.

UN AIDS has identified 22 priority countries for stopping infections in children, 21 of them in sub-Saharan Africa, home to 90 percent of women living with HIV. The other is India.

In three of these priority countries – Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo and Malawi – fewer than 5 percent of infants at risk are being tested for HIV at birth, UNAIDS says.

“In priority countries, only 3 in 10 children receive HIV treatment. We have seen tremendous political commitment and results to reduce mother-to-child transmission but we are failing the children who become infected,” said Sidibe, who is from Mali.

All children under five who test positive for the virus should be put on treatment, according to Mahesh Mahalingam, UNAIDS director for its global plan for stopping new infections in children.

Current PCR tests are able to detect the virus in a baby only after the age of six weeks and require sending a blood sample to a specialized laboratory, he said.

“What we looking for are easier tests that we can administer earlier on, this will help detect the virus and start them on medicines faster. We recommend that as soon as the child is known to be HIV positive, you start on anti-retroviral drugs,” Mahalingam said.

He added: “The earlier we can diagnose, the earlier we can treat them which increase chances of child survival. Children are now getting to grow into adults. If we start pretty early they have the same chance of living as any other children.”

Source : Zee news

 

HIV/AIDS experts awarded $5 million training grants for India, Africa

John hopkinsHIV/AIDS at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Medicine and the university’s Bloomberg School of Public Health have been awarded more than $5 million by the Fogarty International Centre’s HIV Research Training Program to foster health and medical research skills in India, Uganda, Ethiopia and Malawi.

The training funds, to be spread over five years, focus on places hard hit by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, currently estimated to infect some 33.4 million people worldwide.

Four Johns Hopkins awards were among 22 grants announced in October 2013 by Fogarty, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The new funding will be used to train more than 50 undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral research scientists, as well as lab technologists, as part of a broader effort to develop and upgrade the health and medical research infrastructure in these countries, according to Fogarty officials.

Such added local skills, researchers say, are essential to the success of many other US government-funded HIV/AIDS initiatives aimed at preventing and treating people with the disease.

Among the Johns Hopkins faculty serving as principal investigators of the awards are Dr Robert Bollinger (HIV-TB Fogarty Research Training Program in India), Dr Ronald Gray (Male Circumcision and Use of Foreskin Tissues for HIV Prevention in Uganda), Dr Andrea Ruff (Optimizing HIV Prevention in Ethiopia through Implementation Science) and Dr Taha Taha (Training in HIV-related Non-communicable Disease Complications in Malawi).

“These training grants are desperately needed to assemble the critical mass of medical research personnel necessary to plan, organize, implement and monitor how we battle HIV disease in the countries most heavily burdened by the pandemic,” said Fogarty grant recipient Dr Robert Bollinger, a professor at Johns Hopkins and director of its Centre for Clinical Global Health Education.

Source: India Medical Times