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HIV Reservoirs and Strategies for Eradication Workshop: Advanced Program Available

For 10 years now, an international workshop has been launched in order to study the mechanisms of HIV persistence in viral reservoirs and ways to eradicate HIV in patients on potent antiretroviral therapy. Its next edition is scheduled in Miami (Fl, USA) on December 3-6, 2013.

Toulon, France, May 8, 2013 — Combination antiretroviral therapy (cART) has transformed HIV infection from a deadly to a chronic disease. However, HIV-infected patients are still facing problems of compliance, resistance, toxicity, and stigmatization. Furthermore, cART access remains limited in poor-resource countries where most patients reside.

Even if cART is capable of maintaining undetectable levels of plasma viremia in compliant patients, HIV is not eradicated and remains present in some cells, allowing viremia to rise within a few weeks of cART cessation.

HIV latency is the main obstacle to a cure and cells carrying replication-competent HIV are called reservoirs. These HIV reservoirs are stable after more than 10 years of suppressive cART and are not affected by current antiretroviral drugs.

The success of cART at blocking HIV replication has led to a shift in the HIV treatment field toward the development of new strategies to eradicate HIV reservoirs.

In theory, there are 2 kinds of HIV cures:

-A sterilizing cure where no trace of HIV remains;
-A functional cure where HIV replication is controlled without cART. In this condition, a patient can retain some defective viral sequences but viremia 20 copies/ml is a guarantee of no clinical progression and an unlikely risk of virus transmission.

For 10 years now, an international workshop has been launched in order to study the mechanisms of HIV persistence in viral reservoirs and ways to eradicate HIV in patients on potent antiretroviral therapy. This workshop welcomed an increasing number of participants over the years and was held every 2-year in St Marteen. Its next edition is scheduled in Miami (Fl, USA) on December 3-6, 2013. The Steering Committee and the Scientific Committee of this workshop contains renowned scientists working in the field of HIV reservoirs and eradication from USA, Europe and Australia. Participants can submit an abstract to present their work during the meeting.

Over the years, the “International Workshop on HIV Persistence during Therapy” has been recognized as the reference meeting on HIV reservoirs and strategies for eradication. The first editions were mainly focused on the basic mechanisms of HIV persistence, but since the 2011 edition, an increased part is devoted to clinical trials of HIV eradication. For example, this year will be discussed strategies of reactivation of latent HIV, immune therapies and gene therapies.

Researchers working on HIV reservoirs and strategies for eradication, as well as clinicians and pharmaceutical companies are invited to sign in and attend what will be a cornerstone meeting on HIV reservoirs.

The advanced program is available at: http://www.hiv-workshop.com/HIV-Reservoirs-cure-persistence-workshop.htm

About us: the Steering Committee for the “6th International Workshop on HIV Persistence during Therapy” contains Alain Lafeuillade, MD (Toulon, France), Mario Stevenson, MD, PhD (Miami, USA) and David Margolis (Chapel Hill, USA). The Scientific Committee contains academic members and members from R & D from pharmaceutical companies.

Media Contact:
Alain Lafeuillade
General Hospital,
51 rue Henri Ste Claire Deville,
83000 Toulon, France
+33 4 94 14 50 84
lafeuillade@orange.fr

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This Sunday will mark the 30th anniversary of the first reports of AIDS in the United States

Jun 06 2011 /RTPR/ – This Sunday will mark the 30th anniversary of the first reports of AIDS in the United States. There is still a long road ahead toward eradicating HIV, but a “dream team for HIV reservoirs cure” has been created since 2003 with this objective.

While the HIV pandemic is still growing, with more than 7,100 daily new cases of infection, there is evidence that antiretroviral therapy costs could treble over the next 20 years.

Today there are more than 30 drugs approved to treat HIV, and while they cannot cure it, they can keep the virus suppressed to undetectable levels in blood. But HIV persists dormant in some “reservoir” and each time antiretroviral therapy is stopped, the infection rekindles. Lifelong therapy is therefore mandatory but brings problems of compliance, resistance, toxicity and cost.

These reservoirs were first described in 1997 and 5 years later Alain Lafeuillade, a French Doctor involved in HIV research, considered that it would be the challenge of the 21st Century. He consequently founded a working group uniting researchers from all over the world that first met in December 2003. This first “HIV Reservoirs, Persistence and Eradication Strategies Workshop” welcomed around 130 scientists actively involved in the field. “At that time we were seen as utopists, Doctor Lafeuillade said, and quite ignored by funding agencies and pharmaceutical companies”.

But minds greatly changed in the following years and in 2009, when the “dream team” met for the 4th time, the workshop was officially supported by the NIH (National Institutes of Health) and the ANRS (French Agency for AIDS Research). In between 2 workshops, the group of scientists are in touch via a specialized website portal they also have created.

“At the end of this year we will reconvene, Doctor Lafeuillade added, and be more than 200 scientists working on HIV cure”. The program of this 5th workshop goes from in vitro models of HIV persistence to HIV eradication clinical trials. “Participants will be able to define a clear road map for HIV cure research with a precise agenda”, Doctor Lafeuillade emphasized.

About the “HIV Reservoirs, Persistence and Eradication Strategies Workshop” Committees: founding fathers are Alain Lafeuillade (France), Mario Stevenson (USA), Robert Gallo (USA), Jose Gatell (Spain) and Christine Rouzioux (France). The scientific board contains David Margolis (USA), Jose Alcami (Spain), Tae-Wook Chun (USA), Mark Wainberg (Canada), Nicolas Chomont (USA), Monsef Benkirane (France), Françoise Barre-Sinoussi (France), Marie-Lise Gougeon (France)… Web site:http://www.informedhorizons.com/persistence2011/index.html

Contact: Alain Lafeuillade, informed Horizons, LLC
1860 Montreal Road, Suite 2, Tucker GA 30084 USA
Tel: +1 770 573 3020 | Fax: +1 866 534 6438
E-mail: kmorris@informedhorizons.com
Web site: http://www.informedhorizons.com/persistence2011/index.html