Team discovers HIV antibodies
Research could lead to AIDS vaccine

By THOMAS H. MAUGH II
Los Angeles Times

After 15 years of futile search for a vaccine against the AIDS virus, researchers are reporting the tantalizing discovery of antibodies that can prevent the virus from multiplying in the body and producing severe disease.

They do not have a vaccine yet, but they may well have a road map toward the production of one.

A team headquartered at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego reports in the journal Science that they have isolated two so-called broadly neutralizing antibodies that can block the action of many different strains of HIV, the virus responsible for the AIDS pandemic.

Crucial to the discovery is the fact that the antibodies target a portion of HIV that researchers had not previously considered in their search for a vaccine. Moreover, the target is a relatively stable portion of the virus that does not participate in the extensive mutations that have made HIV able to escape from antiviral drugs and previous experimental vaccines.

"This is opening up a whole new area of science," said Dr. Seth Berkley, president and chief executive of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, which funded and coordinated the research.

At least 33 million people worldwide are currently infected with HIV and at least 25 million have died from AIDS, according to the World Health Organization. Two large trials of experimental vaccines have failed, the most recent, in 2007, because the vaccine apparently made people more susceptible to infection.

To find the neutralizing antibodies, researchers went to Thailand, Australia and Africa, collecting blood samples from more than 1,800 people who had been infected with HIV for at least three years without the infection proceeding to severe disease. Such individuals are most likely to produce antibodies that interfere with the replication of the virus.

Researchers at Monogram Biosciences Inc. in South San Francisco then studied the samples most resistant to infection. A team from Theraclone Sciences in Seattle then isolated the antibodies responsible for the resistance.

They ultimately isolated two antibodies, called PG9 and PG16, from one African patient. The antibodies were able to block the activity of about three-quarters of the 162 separate strains of HIV they tested it against.

Immunologist Dennis Burton of Scripps and his colleagues then showed that the antibodies bind to regions of two proteins on the surface of the virus, called gp120 and gp41, that help the virus invade cells. Significantly, these regions had never been considered as targets for vaccines.

Researchers still have a long way to go to produce a vaccine, however. The antibodies themselves could potentially be used as a treatment for infected patients who develop severe disease.

But the long-term hope is to find molecules, either synthetic or natural, that can stimulate the body to produce the broadly neutralizing antibodies. Such molecules could potentially be the basis for a successful vaccine.

Discovery offers new hope for an AIDS vaccine

CTV.ca News Staff
September 4, 2009

The search for an HIV vaccine has taken a major step forward with the discovery of two new immune system tools as well as a vulnerable spot on the virus that causes AIDS.

Researchers have announced they've found two new antibodies that attack the AIDS virus, opening the door to a way to develop a vaccine to the incurable virus.

Researchers led by Dennis Burton of The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, made the discovery after sifting through the blood of 1,800 people infected with AIDS.

They identified two antibodies that seem to neutralize the virus, dubbing the immune system fighters PG9 and PG16. They are the first new HIV antibodies to have been identified in more than 10 years of AIDS research and appear to be 10 times more effective at disarming the virus than already-discovered antibodies.

At the same time, the researchers found a new weak spot on the virus that the antibodies attack, they report in the journal Science. The researchers found that the antibodies target a part of the "spike" that viruses use to infect cells.

"So now we may have a better chance of designing a vaccine that will elicit such broadly neutralizing antibodies, which we think are key to successful vaccine development," said Burton.

Wayne Koff of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, or IAVI, which sponsored the study, said the findings are an exciting advance toward the goal of an effective AIDS vaccine "because now we've got a new, potentially better target on HIV to focus our efforts for vaccine design," he said.

IAVI director Dr. Seth Berkley said the findings will not lead directly to a vaccine. But he says they offer a new way to design one.

While treatments to slow down AIDS infections have been developed in recent years, there is still no cure. Researchers trying to design a vaccine have come up empty-handed, hamstrung by the fact that the virus infects the very immune cells that are supposed to protect the body.

Most frustrating, the virus is constantly mutating, so that any one person can be infected with millions of different versions, each one appearing different to the immune system.

But Burton's team says the newly discovered antibodies are effective against a broad array of HIV strains that span nearly every continent. He says they don't appear to attack every strain but in the lab experiments, they did attack about 80 per cent of the strains they tested, which he says is exceptional considering how variable HIV viruses are.

Vaccines work by training the immune system to generate antibodies against foreign pathogens, such as bacteria and viruses. Antibodies bind or latch on to specific portions of a virus and then prevent that virus from infecting healthy cells.

Eventually, the antibody also targets the invading virus for destruction by calling in other immune cells, known as T cells.

While it may be possible to use antibodies to treat AIDS, by creating an immunoglobulin or gamma globulin, such as the one often used to treat early hepatitis, the eventual goal is a vaccine that could stop the virus from infecting a person in the first place, Berkley said.

According to the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, more than 20 million people have died so far in the AIDS pandemic and about 33 million are living with HIV.

HIV-AIDS rate is increasing across Florida

HIV/AIDS is at a `critical' level for men in Florida, a new study has found.

BY FRED TASKER
Miami Herald
September 3, 2009

MIAMI -- HIV/AIDS among Florida's men has reached critical levels, according to a new state report, and the highest rate in any racial/ethnic groups was in Miami-Dade County.

Overall, one in every 123 adult men in Florida was living with HIV/AIDS through 2008, said the report called Man Up: The Crisis of HIV/AIDS Among Florida's Men, by the Florida Department of Health. Overall, 90,000 Floridians age 13 years and over were living with HIV//AIDS. And 72 percent of them were men.

Overall, African-American men are still hardest hit by HIV/AIDS in terms of the overall infection rate. Statewide, one in 43 African-American men was living with HIV/AIDS. compared with one in 117 Hispanic men and one in 209 non-Hispanic men.

However, the proportion of African Americans among newly infected men declined dramatically between 1999 and 2008.

In 2008, persons living with HIV/AIDS included:

• In Miami-Dade, one in 60 non-Hispanic white men, one in 82 Hispanic men and one in 29 African-American men.

• In Broward, one in 76 non-Hispanic white men, one in 98 Hispanic men and one in 42 African-American men.

Florida's population is 61 percent non-Hispanic white, 22 percent Hispanic, 15 percent African-America and 3 percent other.

Florida's share of the nation's HIV/AIDS cases remains high. In 2006, Florida had 5,550 new infections -- nearly 10 percent of the 56,500 new cases in the entire country.

It's important to know where to target messages about fighting HIV/AIDS, the report said, because ``HIV transmission can be prevented with successful behavior change among those already infected.''

``This report seeks to encourage men to `man up' and take responsibility for the consequences of their sexual actions.''

It urged Florida's men to ``be faithful, use condoms, get tested for HIV, be honest with sexual partners, seek treatment, get an annual physical exam and challenge societal expectations of men that may encourage unsafe behaviors .''

No topic is taboo for Catholic AIDS ministers...

...gathered at the Southeastern Conference of Catholic AIDS Ministers assembly to share their stories, new information, developments and best practices.


KAREN OSBORNE | FLORIDA CATHOLIC CORRESPONDENT
Posted: 08.10.09

WINTER GARDEN | “No referrals, no treatment, just, ‘Oh, by the way, you have full-blown AIDS,’” Lynda Canatsey recalled. “They didn’t expect me to live a year.”

Canatsey was signing the hospital release papers after recovering from a bad case of pneumonia when a doctor came to tell her the news. That 2007 hospitalization should have been a “red flag” right away, she said. But Canatsey never thought a diagnosis of AIDS could even be possible. She lives on disability. She doesn’t engage in risky behaviors. She hasn’t been in a relationship of any sort for six years.

Last week, Canatsey and her parents – Jean and Jack Canatsey, parishioners of St. Mary Magdalen Parish in Altamonte Springs – attended the second annual Southeastern Conference of Catholic AIDS Ministers assembly at Resurrection Parish in Winter Garden in hope of getting some of the answers that have been so long in coming.

“People here will be asking questions that are taboo in public,” Canatsey explained about the Aug. 5-6 gathering.

Attendees came from across Florida, as well as from Georgia, Illinois, Ohio, Hawaii and El Salvador for the gathering. The regional group of ministers formed three years ago after the closure of the National Catholic AIDS Network made it harder for AIDS ministers working in Catholic churches, hospitals and in the community to share their stories, new information, developments and best practices.

In straitened economic times, funding for AIDS ministries is often the first to go – but “when it seems like doors are closing, we have to open windows and share what we have,” explained Southeastern Conference of Catholic AIDS Ministers speaker and co-founder Irene Miranda, director of the Archdiocese of Atlanta’s HIV/AIDS ministry. “SECCAM came out of a vision – we know we have a responsibility to be a voice for the voiceless. It is our concern when our brothers and sisters are sick. It is our concern when they are in pain.”

The organization, she said, wants to make sure that ministers are prepared to meet the needs of those infected and affected by AIDS.

COMPLACENCY SETS IN
Participants began the conference at a Mass celebrated by Bishop Thomas Wenski, who recalled his days as pastor of a Haitian parish in Miami that was greatly affected by the disease. In the early ’80s, most of his Haitian parishioners were in their 20s and 30s; nevertheless, he still buried 80 or 90 people a year, many of them AIDS victims, he said.

In the early days of the epidemic, AIDS ministers had to overcome “ignorance and fear,” Bishop Wenski told the gathered ministers. “Today, you still have to fight against ignorance – but, perhaps, complacency has replaced fear.”

That complacency is partly responsible for a new re-emergence of the disease since 2003, according to Miranda, who developed an AIDS education curriculum for the Archdiocese of Miami in the mid-1980s. Today, there is “less education and less awareness” about AIDS among all segments of the population, leading to a greater spread of the disease; and, she explained, in no place in the country is HIV/AIDS growing faster than in the Southeast.

Florida is among the states that have been particularly hard hit, Miranda said. “Myth No. 1: AIDS is under control in the United States. People have grown complacent. That complacency is not an accident,” she explained.

These days, infection rates in the South disproportionately affect communities of color – Hispanics and African-Americans who are less likely to see a doctor until it’s too late, who more likely to be mobile, and who are less likely to want to talk about it. Other communities at risk include youths, prison inmates and the elderly, Miranda said.

‘AIDS DOESN’T DISCRIMINATE’
Ainhoa Tollinche, a world religions teacher at St. Brendan High School in Miami, runs the school’s four-year AIDS education curriculum and advises its AIDS Awareness Club. She brought binders full of teen-tested ideas, Powerpoint presentations, activities and small group activities to share with assembly participants. Most important for teens to know? “AIDS doesn’t discriminate,” she said.

Also in attendance were Kathryn Hampel and Peg Nye of St. Timothy Parish in Lady Lake, who attended the assembly to help restart an AIDS ministry at their parish. As an AIDS minister in the Diocese of Paterson, N.J., Hampel once stayed with a young man who was dying from the disease because of the shame his mother felt; she stayed away from his bedside because “she was too pained and embarrassed.”

“His mother was so grateful that I could be there, because she couldn’t,” Hampel said.

The spread of AIDS affects the idyllic life of retirees in The Villages, too, she said. “We get the phone calls,” she said, explaining that many of the residents of the retirement community in central Florida have children or grandchildren with AIDS, and they “don’t know where to turn,” she said. The elderly often feel too ashamed or frightened of talking about what they can do for their family members or how they feel with friends or neighbors, Hampel explained.

In Catholic AIDS ministry, “the Lord opens doors and you have to be willing to walk through them. And this is the beauty of this ministry – God’s love is available to so many people, as long as we’re willing to go there,” she said.

FEAR STILL RAMPANT
Among those sharing their knowledge during the assembly were Michelle Fisher, director of the Diocese of Orlando’s Youth and Young Adult Ministry, who spoke on how to teach chastity to teens; Carl Berger, head of a successful AIDS ministry for native Hawaiians in Honolulu; Sandy Gallagher, the program director for the AIDS ministry of the Diocese of Venice; Dominican Sister Rachel Sena and Maria Cristina Acosta of the Florida Catholic AIDS Network; and Jesuit Father Kenneth Overberg, professor of theology at Xavier University.

AIDS quilts made by parishioners of Good Shepherd Parish in Orlando in memory of friends and family members who died from AIDS were displayed in the main hall. Small groups and small parishes such as Good Shepherd can do quite a bit to help those with the disease, according to Janice Griffin of Our Lady Of Lourdes Parish in Atlanta, who came to speak about her parish ministry to an Atlanta AIDS residence.

Through the parish project, which involved the ministries such as the choir, the men’s group and religious education classes, parishioners at Our Lady of Lourdes “realized that people living with AIDS are people just like you and me. They are our neighbors.”

But silence – and fear – still rules the day when it comes to AIDS, participants say.

Canatsey has been rejected by friends and family because of her diagnosis; they’re afraid that she will infect them, even though science has proven that AIDS cannot be passed by simple acts such as touching, hugging, or sharing a water bottle or a Communion cup, she said.

Father Dennis Rausch of the Archdiocese of Miami still hears tales of Catholic churches around the country that deny the Eucharist to AIDS patients for fear of infection – most recently, he told the gathering of writing to one Texas parish that was afraid of allowing a child with AIDS to participate in first Communion with the rest of his class.

One Kissimmee Catholic, who attended the gathering to get information on becoming an AIDS minister, has lost friendships to the truth: She is HIV-positive. Diagnosed when she was pregnant, the doctors counseled her to abort. She chose otherwise, and her baby was born without the disease. Some members of her family still do not know about the diagnosis she received nearly two decades ago, which is why she wished to remain anonymous. “I know I have to tell (them),” she said. “I just need an angel to be with me.”

In AIDS ministry, “there’s a lot of work that needs to be done,” Miranda explained. “We need to do a better job at getting information out there. AIDS has never been just a gay white disease. We as a Church need to be a place of welcome, so that we stop burying people in silence.”

For many people with AIDS, even a little more awareness and understanding could make a world of difference, according to Canatsey. She’d like to begin with something very simple – for example, to be connected with a real Seminole County support group for people with AIDS. It’s harder than it looks, she says.

“They keep on sending me to Alcoholics Anonymous groups, because they say ‘it’s the closest thing,’” she said.

Opinion: Rapid home tests stem HIV spread

By Dr. Mary Jane Rotheram,, Dr. Arleen Leibowitz
 and Kevin Farrell
 

August 24, 2009 
Atlanta Journal Constitution
 
In Atlanta this week, the nation’s public health strategy to eliminate HIV is being hotly debated.

Our public health leaders have strongly endorsed a strategy to test and treat all Americans: everyone is encouraged to get tested once for HIV as an adult; adults in communities with a high prevalence of HIV may need to be tested multiple times; and access to HIV treatment is to be guaranteed to all HIV-infected persons.

Decisions about who gets tested, where, when and how they get tested will have a major impact on the effectiveness of this strategy.

Universal testing would identify the 25 percent of HIV-infected persons who do not now know their HIV status and allow them to enter treatment.

This would be a great benefit, both to the individual and to society.

Adults who know they are HIV-positive usually protect their partners from acquiring HIV by stopping unprotected sex and needle sharing.

Furthermore, once HIV-infected persons take anti-retroviral medications, risky acts are far less likely to transmit the virus. The test and treat rationale makes common sense.
However, significant and dramatic shifts in where and how we conduct HIV testing may be necessary to reach the most affected populations.

Gay and bisexual men, who may be hiding their sexual orientation from loved ones, are the most likely to avoid HIV testing in a physician’s office.

In communities of color, HIV-infected persons typically do not find out they are infected until they are already showing symptoms of HIV, often 10 years after becoming infected.

To make HIV testing more accessible, cheaper and less stigmatized, we endorse wide availability of HIV rapid tests that the consumer can self-administer using a sample of tissue from the cheek or a sample of blood from a finger stick.

Screening oneself for HIV could be similar to testing oneself to find out about pregnancy.
Home-administered HIV antibody screening tests could be made available at a pharmacy for a cost substantially below the current $40 price for home HIV tests.

Read in the privacy of one’s own home, without the need to send samples to a laboratory and without the need to have another person read the test, home tests can maintain confidentiality.

Two rapid screening tests can confirm whether or not it is necessary to seek confirmation of HIV status from a physician.

Persons who test at doctor’s offices or community-based organizations today usually wait a year to start getting services.

With a home test, at least these persons will stop transmitting the virus when learning their HIV status.

To date, the FDA has required a third party to administer and/or interpret the HIV test results.
Perhaps these policies reflect pressure from groups with vested interests in maintaining the status quo: laboratories, community-based HIV testing sites or pharmaceutical agencies. In China, rapid tests cost less than $2.

Rapid, consumer-controlled HIV testing strategies have been blocked, similar to the way in which consumer-controlled pregnancy tests were blocked in the 1970s.

Pregnancy was considered too traumatic to learn without the support of their doctor. Today home, consumer-controlled pregnancy testing is routine.

Buying rapid HIV screening tests at your local drugstore may succeed in achieving broad use in urban inner cities and allow couples and families to find out their HIV status in the privacy of their home.

To have the greatest impact on HIV infection, let persons who are frequently exposed to HIV have an easy way to protect others, by finding out quickly that they are infected.

Health care reform, at every level, is going to require greater individual responsibility for maintaining our own health.

Let’s start with providing tools to those most likely to get HIV to take personal responsibility to protect themselves and others.

Dr. Mary Jane Rotheram, Dr. Arleen Leibowitz and Kevin Farrell are researchers at the Center for HIV Identification, Prevention and Treatments Services at UCLA.

Magic Johnson addresses National HIV Prevention Conference

Magic Johnson addresses National HIV Prevention Conference
Being face of disease both blessing and curse, former NBA star says
From an article by DYANA BAGBY, Southern Voice | Aug 24 2009

Former NBA star Earvin “Magic” Johnson wowed hundreds of attendees Sunday at the opening plenary of the 2009 HIV Prevention Conference in Atlanta, as he spoke frankly about being HIV positive for nearly 20 years.

“They said I wouldn’t be here, but last Friday I celebrated my 50th birthday,” said Johnson, who announced he was HIV positive in November 1991.

“A lot has changed since I announced. We now have a major problem in urban American, in inner cities — the face of AIDS has changed from a gay white man’s disease to a black and Latino disease. And if we don’t get the black church involved, there is no way we can bring these numbers [of new HIV cases] down," he said.

Johnson, who played with the Los Angeles Lakers and helped carry the team to five championships, walked among the crowd in the Centennial Ball Room of the Hyatt Regency in downtown Atlanta as he spoke, shaking hands with attendees as well as stopping to pose for pictures.

After announcing he was HIV positive, Johnson founded the Magic Johnson Foundation to combat the spread of HIV and educate people about safer sex. He has said he is not gay but contracted the disease through having numerous sexual partners during his NBA career.

His foundation is working to partner with black churches, he said Sunday, because African Americans are disproportionately impacted by the disease.

According to a 2006 report from the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, a sponsor of the conference, while African Americans make up 12 percent of the U.S. population, blacks account for 45 percent of new infections and 46 percent of those living with HIV. Also, gay and bisexual black men accounted for 63 percent of new infections among black men in 2006, the CDC reported.

“We have talked to pastors to get involved in any way,” Johnson said to cheers from the crowd.

Churches can be involved, for example, by using their vans and buses to transport those with HIV/AIDS to doctors’ appointments and pharmacies to pick up their medication. Johnson said pastors are also being asked to get in the pulpit and tell their congregations to get tested for HIV — and then go back and get the results.

“We all have to get black churches involved. If we do, we will see change quickly,” Johnson said. “One constant in the black community is the church.”

Johnson said young black gay men are also at serious risk.

“Now young black gay men are more open than before, they are more accepted by their peers. In Atlanta, you see a lot of that,” he said. “That was never accepted when I grew up. We need to teach them about safe sex and tell them what can happen — because when you’re young, you think you are invincible.”

Johnson also acknowledged him being HIV positive has been good for the movement to stop the spread of HIV by being able to raise awareness, but it also has been a “curse.”

“Because people can say, well, if I get HIV, I can be like Magic,” he said. "But there is also someone dying from AIDS every day in the U.S. On our historically black college campuses, numbers are rising. We have to get the sororities and fraternities involved. This is so, so important.

“I love being the face of the disease, but I have not enjoyed where we are headed. We still have numbers that are not far down enough."

More than 3,000 public health, medical and AIDS community leaders are in Atlanta through Aug. 26 for the National HIV Prevention Conference.

“This conference is a reminder that HIV prevention can and does save lives,” said Kevin Fenton in a statement.

Fenton is the conference co-chair and director of CDC’s National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD & TB Prevention. “However, the HIV crisis is far from over. Too many people remain at risk, and too few people have access to proven HIV prevention programs.”

More than 1 million people in the U.S. are living with HIV and the CDC estimates more than 56,000 Americans contract the disease each year — that’s one person every nine and a half minutes. Gay and bisexual men of all races as well as African Americans and Latinos are most severely impacted by HIV.

California: HIV & AIDS Programs Face State Budget Cuts

KION News
8/21/09

SALINAS, Calif. - Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has just signed off on $52 million in budget cuts, affecting state-run HIV and AIDS programs. That concerns non-profits like Salinas-based John XXIII, who provide services to clients in Monterey County.

The organization provides not only education and prevention, but housing, HIV and Hepatitis C testing as well as a needle exchange program.

While they aren't clear how much they'll lose, Supervisor Jim Smith says, their anticipating drastic cuts of at least $150,000 in just their education and prevention program alone.

They're now planning to limit the amount of testing they do. In the past, they were been able to provide free HIV testing to everyone, but will now only offer it to high-risk individuals.

Also, they plan to decrease their hours. They used to be open five days a week, now they're cutting back to three days a week. Not to mention they've already let go of a handful of employees.

"If people can't get tested for HIV, and they don't have the money to pay for it, where are they going to go?," says Smith. "Just because the money has stopped, doesn't mean HIV is going to slow down. It's still a disease. It's still out there. It affects everybody."

Despite the cuts in state funding, they will continue to offer services and seek out other sources of funding, including private donors and grants.

Last year, Smith says, eight people tested positive with HIV out of 700 tests they did.