HIV

In the lead-up to #WorldAIDSDay2022, people wonder, is an HIV cure attainable in our lifetime?

Yes, we believe there are good reasons to be optimistic about a cure:

• The advances in treatment
• Better access to therapy
• Early initiation of effective antiretroviral treatment
• Increasing numbers of children living with HIV who are surviving into adolescence and beyond
• Reported cases of people living with HIV with a viral reservoir to a level that allowed maintenance of remission even after treatment interruption.

The EPIICAL General Assembly was held online and in person in Venice on 2-4 November 2022. It brought together 80 participants from 29 organisations from the EPIICAL consortium. Attendees came together to discuss, among other topics, highlights of the project as a clinical and experimental platform to evaluate therapeutic strategies for HIV remission and/or cure in children, updates in the treatment and management of paediatric HIV and the vision for EPIICAL in 2024 and beyond.

Authors: Burke, T; Conway, M

Presented at: AIDS 2022 an the International Workshop on HIV & Adolescence 2022

Authors: Cebekhulu, S; Shibemba, M; Conway, M; Kiganda, C; Ahimbisibwe, Bhiri, J; Carter, A; Ely, A; Gondo, S; Nkosi, N.

Presented at: AIDS 2022 and International Workshop on HIV & Adolescence 2022

Babies and young children treated with the anti-HIV drug dolutegravir, in combination with other anti-HIV drugs, are more likely to keep the virus under control, compared to those treated with standard anti-HIV treatment combinations. This is according to results from part of the ODYSSEY trial that were published yesterday in The Lancet HIV.

This is consistent with previous results from older children in the ODYSSEY trial,

CARMA Global is an EPIICAL cross-sectional, multi-country, multi-site, low interventional study on children, adolescents and youth who started ART at three months or younger at least seven years ago and are currently on ART. The study aims to investigate viral reservoirs in these populations to better understand why ART is more effective in some patients than in others. In the social component, the study will collect data on attitudes towards HIV research to develop strategies to keep participants enrolled in clinical trials.

Authors:Jacobs TG, Schouwenburg S, Penazzato M, Archary M, Ruel TD, van den Anker J, Burger DM, Cressey TR, Abrams EJ, Lyall H, Bekker A, Colbers A; Penta Clinical Pharmacology Working Group; PADO-HIV 5 participants.

Published in: The Lancet

Authors: Turkova A, Waalewijn H, Chan M, Bollen P, Bwakura-Dangarembizi M, Kekitiinwa A, Cotton M, Lugemwa A, Variava E, Ahimbisibwe MG, Srirompotong U, Mumbiro V,Amuge P, Zuidewind P, Ali S, Kityo C,Archary M, Ferrand R, Violari A, Gibb D,Burger D, Ford D, Colbers A, on behalf of the ODYSSEY Trial Team

Published in: The Lancet

Results from a substudy of the ODYSSEY trial show that children being treated for tuberculosis (TB) and HIV at the same time can safely have the anti-HIV medicine dolutegravir twice a day. These results were published yesterday in The Lancet HIV journal.

Around 50,000 children are co-infected with both TB and HIV each year. Treating the two diseases at the same time is complicated, as a commonly used TB drug,

A new trial opened in May, aiming to find out if children and young people living with HIV can take two anti-HIV medicines instead of three. The trial has already recruited 57 participants in Uganda and Thailand.

People living with HIV have to take medicines for life. Therefore, it is important to ensure that these medicines work well and continue to be safe to take for children and young people living with HIV.

The first two participants of the SHIELD trial (PENTA-22) were screened by Dr. Renate Strehlau and her team at Rahima Moosa Mother and Child Hospital, Johannesburg, South Africa in June 2022.  SHIELD is the first paediatric trial on Fostemsavir, targeting children living with HIV that have developed resistance to two or more antiretroviral drug classes.

SHIELD aims to evaluate the safety of fostemsavir when taken with optimized background antiretroviral therapy.

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]By design, capacity building is a fundamental part of the UNIVERSAL project. The aim of the project’s capacity building activities are to improve the ability of African and European young investigators in designing and conducting clinical trials. As such, the project conducted a Training Needs Assessment (TNA) from March 17^th to June 21^st 2021 among 108 African early career researchers from Cameroon, Mali, Senegal,

The results of an ODYSSEY pharmacokinetic sub-study investigating dolutegravir (DTG) based antiretroviral (ARV) treatments for children weighing 3 to less than 20kg have recently been published in The Lancet HIV as an Open Access article.

DTG has been available for treating HIV in adults globally for many years with paediatric formulations only developed in recent years. Very little pharmacokinetic data were available in young children when the ODYSSEY trial was opened to young children.

The ODYSSEY trial’s final paper Dolutegravir as First- or Second-Line Treatment for HIV-1 Infection in Children has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine. ODYSSEY, sponsored by Penta and funded by ViiV Healthcare, is the first randomised controlled trial to compare the efficacy and safety of dolutegravir-based regimens to non-dolutegravir-based standard-of-care regimens in children and adolescents.

Dolutegravir (DTG) is a drug shown to be highly effective and safe in treating HIV in adults,

Penta youth in collaboration with IAS, have organised a webinar taking place on Thursday, 16 December at 12pm CET (GMT+1) on the theme Invest in our future: How to walk the talk of ethical Youth engagement in the HIV response.

The objectives of the webinar are to showcase best practices for youth participation within the HIV sector, to highlight the current gaps in proactive responses to youth participation models and insight,

We are proud to announce that the REACH project’s Result in Brief article, Reducing infectious disease in mothers and children in Russia, has been uploaded on the CORDIS website. This is a great opportunity to share our work, with the rest of the world and will ensure that our study results, when available, are available to many. None of what REACH has achieved would have been possible without the collaborative effort of our partners in Europe and the Russian Federation.