News (Updated
July 5, 2009)
[Home]
[Previous
news]
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
CBC News
Dozens of HIV vaccines
have already been developed and tested in animal models but only a handful have
been tested in humans, none successfully. (Canadian Press)
An HIV/AIDS vaccine
developed in
"It is a very
important milestone for us," said Yong Kang, a professor of microbiology at
the
Kang said he expects to
get the go-ahead soon from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to begin human
toxicology tests and two phases of clinical trials in the
If all three trials are
successful, the vaccine should be available within the next decade, Kang told
CBC News on the phone while attending a meeting in
According to a 2008 United
Nations report on the global AIDS epidemic, 33 million people were living with
HIV in 2007. Two million people died of causes related to the disease that year.
Dozens of HIV vaccines
have already been developed and tested in animal models, but few have been
tested in humans, none successfully. A promising trial in 2007 by pharmaceutical
giant Merck and Co. was shut down after those receiving the vaccine contracted
HIV at a higher rate than those who received the placebo.
Kang has partnered with a
Curacom, a South Korean holding company, that has agreed to open an office in
A test vaccine is being
manufactured in a lab in
Lab tests showed the
vaccine produced no adverse effects or safety risks during immunology tests on
animals.
The toxicology tests are
expected to include 40 to 50 HIV-positive volunteers in the
03 Jul 2009
HIV-infected infants risk contracting a deadly form of tuberculosis from the
bacille Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccine, instead of receiving protection against
the disease, according to research published today in the international public
health journal, the Bulletin of the World Health Organization.
While the BCG vaccine is given to approximately 75% of newborn babies worldwide,
a South African study has found that its harm may outweigh the benefits for
HIV-infected infants. The study recommends delaying vaccination until the
infant's HIV status is known.
"There is an urgent need to assess the risk versus benefits of this vaccine
in settings where both HIV infection and tuberculosis burdens are high,"
says co-author Professor Simon Schaaf, from the Desmond Tutu TB Centre at
The Bulletin of the World Health Organization is one of the world's leading
public health journals. It is the flagship periodical of the World Health
Organization, with a special focus on developing countries. Research papers are
peer reviewed and are independent of WHO recommendations and guidelines.
ScienceDaily (July 4,
2009) — In a study published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases,
researchers from Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have
identified cells in blood that predict which HIV-positive individuals are most
likely to develop deadly fungal meningitis, a major cause of HIV-related death.
This form of meningitis affects more than 900,000 HIV-infected people
globally—most of them in sub-Saharan
The risk of developing
fungal meningitis from Cryptococcus neoformans rises dramatically when people
have weakened immunity, due to HIV infection or other reasons including the use
of immunosuppressive drugs after organ transplantation, or for treating
autoimmune diseases or cancer. Knowing which patients are most likely to develop
fungal meningitis would allow costly drugs for preventing fungal disease to be
targeted to those most in need. (In the
In this study, Liise-anne
Pirofski, M.D., describes a technique for predicting which HIV-infected patients
are at greatest risk for developing fungal meningitis caused by Cryptococcus
neoformans. Dr. Pirofski is chief in the division of infectious diseases at
Einstein.
Dr. Pirofski and her
colleagues counted the number of immune cells known as IgM memory B cells in the
bloodstream of three groups of individuals: people infected with HIV who had a
history of fungal meningitis caused by Cryptococcus neoformans; people infected
with HIV but with no history of the disease; and those with no history of either
HIV infection or the disease.
"We were astounded to
find a profound difference in the level of these IgM memory B cells between the
HIV-infected groups," said Dr. Pirofski. "The HIV-infected people with
fungal meningitis caused by Cryptococcus neoformans had much lower levels of
these cells."
The research team wanted
to know if the lower levels of IgM memory B cells in certain HIV-infected
individuals resulted from the fungal disease, or whether their reduced levels of
these cells preceded their development of the disease.
To find out, Dr. Pirofski
analyzed frozen blood samples taken from HIV-infected patients before they had
developed fungal meningitis due to Cryptococcus neoformans. Years before these
HIV-infected patients were diagnosed with meningitis, their blood had far fewer
IgM memory B cells than HIV-infected patients who didn't come down with the
disease. This suggests that some people are predisposed to develop fungal
meningitis because they have low levels of IgM memory B cells that may be due to
their genetic makeup.
These findings could be
important for many other immunocompromised patients in addition to those
infected with HIV. "We think that knowing whether transplant recipients or
other patients taking immunosuppressive drugs have low numbers of IgM memory B
cells could be useful in deciding which patients should receive antifungal drugs
to prevent meningitis caused by Cryptococcus neoformans," says Dr. Pirofski.
Krishanthi Subramanian,
Ph.D., who did her thesis work in Dr. Pirofski's laboratory, is the first author
of the study.
Drugs used to care for
Parkinson's disease might be a new way to halt the increase of drug-resistant
forms of tuberculosis,
They stated that both computer models and lab experiments found that the drugs
tolcapone, or Tasmar, made by Valeant Pharmaceuticals, and entacapone, or Comtan,
made by Novartis AG have the possibility to fight multiple-drug-resistant
strains of TB.
Computer programs forecasted that the chemically comparable drugs should throw
off the TB bacillus, and tests in labs using the drug Comtan established it, the
researchers said.
1.8 million people die globally every year from tuberculosis and 2 billion
people are infected, stated the World Health Organization.
Quite a few people unintentionally have dormant infections that can become
active if their immune system becomes destabilized with other viruses, like HIV.
The WHO noted that of the 9 million new TB cases every year, 490,000 are
multiple-drug resilient TB or MDR-TB and 40,000 are considerably drug resilient
or XDR-TB.
"Given the continuing emergence of M. tuberculosis strains that are
resistant to all existing, affordable drug treatments, the development of novel,
effective and inexpensive drugs is an urgent priority," said Sarah Kinnings,
a graduate student at the
Kinnings and his fellow researchers utilized computer models and conducted
experiments to find established drugs that might treat resilient forms of TB.
They discovered that the active factor in both Comtan and Tasmar could also
impede the multiple-drug defiant tuberculosis bacterium.
The drugs obstruct the brain chemical COMT, which prevents it from breaking down
the Parkinson's drugs. Their molecular configuration also lets them impede a
compound that TB bugs require to thicken their defensive cell wall.
Tasmar can harm the liver but Comtan does not and could be taken to battle TB,
said Philip Bourne of the
"We have computational and experimental data to support this
repositioning," Bourne said in a statement.
Internationally, drug-resistant tuberculosis has the highest rates ever seen,
says the World Health Organization. They are specifically a threat in
The study is published in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS
Computational Biology.