Computer modeling has helped a team of scientists, including several scholars from the University of Chicago, to decode previously unknown details about the process by which HIV forces cells to spread the virus to other cells. The findings, published Nov. 7 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may offer a new avenue for drugs to combat the virus. (more…)
In total, about 88,400 people were living with HIV in Germany at the end of 2016. An estimated 12,700 of them do not know they are infected. (more…)
When HIV/AIDS became a pandemic, epidemiologists wanted to know where it began. In the 1980s, they found their answer in a freezer filled with blood. This blood had been collected in the 1950s from members of indigenous communities in Africa as part of anthropological research on human variation. To this day, that sample is the oldest trace of HIV known to biomedicine. It is what launched Joanna Radin’s interest in the field of biobanking, a means of preserving blood and other tissues for future research. It is also what led her to write her recently published book, “Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood.” (more…)
A new technique that allowed researchers to analyze genetic material from serum samples of HIV patients taken before AIDS was known provides a glimpse into the beginnings of the epidemic.
Researchers at the University of Arizona and the University of Cambridge in the U.K. have reconstructed the origins of the AIDS pandemic in unprecedented detail. (more…)
Scientists are locked in a perpetual race with deadly bacteria, struggling to come up with new drugs as bacteria evolve new defenses. Corey Compton has demonstrated that a strategy focused on how bacteria develop resistance can give drugs — new and old — a leg up. (more…)
ANN ARBOR — A personalized web app designed to encourage young men at risk for sexually transmitted diseases to go for testing has proven successful in a small trial conducted in Southeast Michigan.
Researchers at the University of Michigan’s Center for Sexuality & Health Disparities developed the web-based program called “Get Connected” to encourage young men who have sex with men to get tested for HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, including chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis. (more…)
Small trial by UCLA and Buck Institute succeeds using ‘systems approach’ to memory disorders
Patient 1 had two years of progressive memory loss. She was considering quitting her job, which involved analyzing data and writing reports, she got disoriented driving, and she mixed up the names of her pets.
Patient 2 kept forgetting once-familiar faces at work, forgot his gym locker combination and had to have his assistants constantly remind him of his work schedule. (more…)
ANN ARBOR — HIV-infected people carry many different HIV viruses and all have distinct personalities—some much more vengeful and infectious than others.
Yet, despite the breadth of infectivity, roughly 76 percent of HIV infections arise from a single virus. Now, scientists believe they can identify the culprit with very specific measurements of the quantities of a key protein in the HIV virus. (more…)
