If you’ve got a few spare moments, watch the wonderful Nic Holas from HIV advocacy group The Institute of Many interview Professor Sharon Lewin. They discuss the latest in the search for an HIV cure. This interview first aired as a Facebook Live event on March 1st 2017, just a few days after the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) finished in Seattle, Washington.
What do they talk about?
Look out for these topics (time markers given):
1:25 What is CROI?
2:40 Busting the myth that an HIV cure already exists
5:50 Research collaboration to work towards a cure (the Delaney AIDS Research Enterprise)
7:05 Timeline to a cure
10:33 What is the latent HIV reservoir?
12:23 Cure research aims to both get rid of HIV and build up immunity to HIV
12:40 Question: why can’t HIV+ people undergo the treatment that was given to the Berlin patient?
16:30 Other HIV+ bone marrow transplant cases
19:00 What can people expect if they volunteer for HIV cure trials?
20:05 Types of cure trials – observational and interventional
22:06 Treatment interruption
24:30 Research on attitudes and motivations of trial participants
26:30 Discussion about the Spanish HIV vaccine trial presented at CROI
31:35 Preventative HIV vaccines
33:00 Importance of the partnership between HIV positive people and researchers
