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,

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

[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.

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.

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.

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.

We are proud to announce that the REACH project’s Result in Brief article, Reducing infectious disease in mothers and children in Russia,

With a great sadness I learnt today that Scott passed away. The IAS obituary says everything about him as a great scientist. I just would like to remember him as a very good friend who cared about children throughout his professional life.

It was announced at the 8th European AIDS Conference that Angela Colbers and David Burger received the Hector Research Award in HIV 2021 in clinical and/or epidemiological science on behalf of the ODYSSEY trial team!

Project New Generation (PNG+) are a group of young people living with HIV who serve as the voice of the youth involved in the REACH study. Made up of two groups,

The CARMA team in the EPIICAL consortium have just published the article Early ART initiation during infancy preserves natural killer cells in young European adolescents living with HIV (CARMA cohort) in the Journal of International AIDS Society.