The founding core group welcomes new partnerships with academic institutions, biotechnology groups and pharmaceutical companies.
Toulon, France (PRWEB) December 7, 2010
Doctor Alain Lafeuillade, specialist in infectious diseases and chair of the biennial ‘International HIV Persistence Workshop’, announces the launching of a multi-disciplinary working group in the fight against HIV and AIDS.
Despite the availability of antiretroviral combinations able to block viral replication, HIV persists in viral reservoirs and infection rekindles each time therapy is stopped. Life-long administration of drugs is the current standard but disease evolves slowly in some compartments -like the brain- and a persistent state of inflammation favors the occurrence of cardio-vascular complications, premature aging as well as the emergence of cancers.
Consequently, despite major therapeutic advances over the last 15 years, life expectancy remains significantly lower for a person with HIV, even in countries with top quality health care.
New therapeutic approaches are now warranted to target residual HIV infection in antiretroviral-treated patients. These new strategies will test drugs designed to ‘purge’ the HIV reservoir, ‘control’ it or induce a ‘sabotage’ of HIV infection. Gene therapy is another promising avenue as the only patient in the world who has probably been cleared from HIV is the ‘Berlin case’ who received a bone marrow transplant with cells lacking expression of an HIV co-receptor.
The launching of this group follows a need expressed by several scientists from various areas (basic research, animal models, clinical science, virology, pharmacology, immunology) who attended the last ‘HIV Persistence Workshop’ a year ago. It is a link between scientists working on the same topic in Europe, Australia and America.
‘I am quite exited by the commitment of all those who reached the group,’ Doctor Lafeuillade said, ‘I think that we can make the difference within a few years.’
This initiative will help translating basic research into clinical research, the ‘bench to bedside’ concept, more rapidly. This research community will define priorities according to their mid-term translation into pilot HIV eradication trials.
The ‘HIV Persistence Workshop’ was founded by Doctor Lafeuillade at the end of 2003 and, until 2009, worked as a biennial think tank gathering around 150 researchers actively involved in the field of HIV persistence. The next edition in December 2011 will focus on the preliminary results of this working group.
To learn more about this initiative, visit: http://www.hiv-reservoir.net.
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