Mediaboss Marketing

WASHINGTON: US-funded scientists said Thursday they have devised an experimental vaccine against a common childhood illness called respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).

There is currently no vaccine on the market for RSV, which is the world's second-leading killer of babies aged one month to one year, after malaria.

RSV causes inflammation in the small airways of the lungs and is the most common cause of pneumonia in babies and of hospitalisation of children under five.

"Many common diseases of childhood are now vaccine-preventable, but a vaccine against RSV infection has eluded us for decades," said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

"This work marks a major step forward," he said, citing promising animal studies that showed a wide-ranging protective effect.

Planning is under way for human trials of the vaccine.

The research on the vaccine and its structure-based design is described in the journal Science.

View post:
US makes experimental vaccine against childhood virus

Professor Ruth Bishop has been named the 2013 CSL Florey Medallist for her discovery of the rotavirus responsible for the deaths of half a million children each year.

By their third birthday, just about every child in the world has had a rotavirus infection. Every day about 1200 children die from it; half a million children every year. Thats changing. Were fighting back thanks to a discovery made in 1973 by a quiet Melbourne researcherthis years winner of the 2013 CSL Florey Medal.

That was when Ruth Bishop, Brian Ruck, Geoffrey Davidson and Ian Holmes at the Royal Childrens Hospital and the University of Melbournes microbiology department found a virus, now known as rotavirus. Until the middle of the last decade, it put about 10,000 Australian children in hospital each year with acute gastroenteritis. In the next decade, as a direct result of their research, millions of young lives will be saved.

The discovery initiated a lifes work for Ruthunderstanding the virus, working out how it spreads and fighting back with treatments and vaccines. As a result, vaccination against gastro has been part of the National Immunisation Program for all Australian infants since July 2007. And the number of hospital admissions has dropped by more than 70 per cent.

Globally, rotavirus infection still leads to more than 450,000 child deaths each year. But thats changing too. Fifty million children in the poorest countries will be vaccinated by 2015 by GAVI, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation, and their partners, supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Figures available from Bolivia, the first low-income country to take part in the program, show a drop of about three-quarters of all hospitalisations.

Yet Ruth Bishop, a quietly-spoken Australian microbiologist now in her eighties, wont be fully satisfied until a new vaccine she helped develop becomes available. Its intended for newborns, the only time children in many developing countries are likely to be near a hospital, she says. The vaccine is currently being trialled in Indonesia and New Zealand.

For her work in saving the lives of young children worldwide and inspiring a revolution in public health, Professor Ruth Bishop has won the 2013 CSL Florey Medal, a $50,000 biennial award made by the Australian Institute of Policy and Science. The medal honours Australian researchers who have made significant achievements in biomedical science and/or in advancing human health.

The main problem with gastroenteritis is dehydration. The infection destroys mature cells lining the small intestine that absorb nutrients, fluids and electrolytes. If they cant do their job, Ruth says, you get watery diarrhoea. Children can lose up to 10 per cent of their bodyweight in fluid, and then they are in real strife.

Ruth started on the hunt for the cause of gastro when she returned to work at Melbournes Royal Childrens Hospital (RCH) in 1965 after a post-doctoral fellowship in the UK. She looked initially for a bacterium, but couldnt find any candidate that could be linked to gastroenteritis. Then, in the early 70s, she got another chance. By this stage there were hints emerging in the scientific journals that a virus may be involved.

Researchers from the RCH Department of Gastroenterology had started to study another nasty aspect of gastroenteritislong-term malnourishment and sugar intolerance. They had developed a biopsy technique for the small intestine, and were using it to examine whether it was possible to predict sugar intolerance and thus move early to treat it. Ruth realised she could put the samples they took to further use by examining them under an electron microscope.

Read more:
Saving young lives by the million

Current ratings for: First child 'cured' of HIV remains in remission for 18 months

Ratings require JavaScript to be enabled.

Researchers have revealed that a 3-year-old girl from Mississippi who was born with HIV continues to be in remission 18 months after her combination antiretroviral treatment was stopped. This is according to an updated case report published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Medical News Today reported on the early findings of this case in March this year, in which the researchers said was the first case of a "functional cure" in an HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) positive infant.

But the research team from the Johns Hopkins Children's Center, the University of Massachusetts Medical School and the University of Mississippi Medical Center, say this confirmation of their findings suggest that the child's remission is "not a mere fluke."

They add that the findings provide "compelling evidence" that if an HIV positive child is started on antiretroviral therapy within the first hours or days of infection, viral remission can be achieved.

Born to an HIV-infected mother, the child began aggressive antiretroviral therapy (ART) 30 hours after birth.

Through a series of blood tests carried out days and weeks after treatment first began, the child demonstrated rapidly diminishing levels of the virus in her blood. When tested 29 days after birth, there were no detectable traces of the viral infection.

The child received antiviral treatment until she was 18-months-old, after which point the treatment was stopped. After undergoing standard repeat HIV tests around 10 months after the ceasing of treatment, the report states that physicians detected no HIV in her blood.

The researchers believe that through beginning the child's treatment so early, ART was able to halt the formation of hard-to-treat viral reservoirs. These are defined as immune cells with "dormant" HIV that can reignite the infection within weeks of ceasing therapy.

View original post here:
First child 'cured' of HIV remains in remission for 18 months

[ Watch The Video: Barrier To HIV Cure Bigger Than Previously Thought ]

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports Your Universe Online

Although current treatments for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) can keep the disease at bay, a larger-than-expected amount of hidden virus may complicate efforts to find a cure, according to the most detailed and comprehensive analysis to date of the latent reservoir of HIV proviruses.

The three-year study, published Thursday in the journal Cell, deals a painful blow to researchers working hard to find a cure for HIV/AIDS, a disease that kills nearly two million people per year according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Infectious disease experts at John Hopkins found that the amount of potentially active, dormant forms of HIV hiding in infected immune T cells may actually be 60 times greater than previously thought.

This hidden HIV is part of the so-called latent reservoir of functional proviruses that remains long after antiretroviral drug therapy has successfully brought viral replication to a standstill. If antiretroviral therapy is stopped or interrupted, some proviruses can reactivate, allowing HIV to make copies of itself and resume infection of other immune cells, the researchers said.

Senior study investigator Robert Siliciano, M.D., Ph.D., who in 1995 first showed that reservoirs of dormant HIV were present in immune cells, said that while the current studys results show most proviruses in the latent reservoir are defective, curing the disease will depend on finding a way to target all proviruses with the potential to restart the infection.

These results indicate an increased barrier to cure, as all intact noninduced proviruses need to be eradicated, Siliciano said. Although cure of HIV infection may be achievable in special situations, the elimination of the latent reservoir is a major problem, and it is unclear how long it will take to find a way to do this.

The studys results showed that among 213 HIV proviruses that were isolated from the reservoirs of eight patients and that were initially unresponsive to highly potent biological stimuli, some 12 percent could later still become active and capable of replicating their genetic material and transmitting infection to other cells. All of these non-induced proviruses had previously been thought to be defective, with no possible role in resumption of the disease, said Siliciano, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

These disappointing findings pose a serious problem to prevailing hopes for the so-called shock and kill approach to curing HIV, he said. That approach refers to forcing dormant proviruses to turn back on, making them visible and vulnerable to the immune systems cytolytic killer T cells, and then eliminating infected cells from the body while antiretroviral drugs prevent any new cells from becoming infected.

Read more from the original source:
HIV's Secret Hideout Frustrates Efforts To Develop A Cure

Oct. 24, 2013 Just when some scientists were becoming more hopeful about finding a strategy to outwit HIV's ability to resist, evade and otherwise survive efforts to rid it from the body, another hurdle has emerged to foil their plans, new research from Johns Hopkins shows.

In a cover-story report on the research to be published in the journal Cell online Oct. 24, Johns Hopkins infectious disease experts say the amount of potentially active, dormant forms of HIV hiding in infected immune T cells may actually be 60-fold greater than previously thought.

The hidden HIV, researchers say, is part of the so-called latent reservoir of functional proviruses that remains long after antiretroviral drug therapy has successfully brought viral replication to a standstill.

The disappointing finding comes after a three-year series of lab experiments, which they say represents the most detailed and comprehensive analysis to date of the latent reservoir of HIV proviruses. If antiretroviral therapy is stopped or interrupted, some proviruses can reactivate, allowing HIV to make copies of itself and resume infection of other immune cells.

Senior study investigator Robert Siliciano, M.D., Ph.D., who in 1995 first showed that reservoirs of dormant HIV were present in immune cells, says that while the latest study results show most proviruses in the latent reservoir are defective, curing the disease will depend on finding a way to target all proviruses with the potential to restart the infection.

Study results showed that among 213 HIV proviruses isolated from the reservoirs of eight patients and initially unresponsive to highly potent biological stimuli, some 12 percent could later still become active, and were capable of replicating their genetic material and transmitting infection to other cells. Siliciano says that all of these non-induced proviruses had previously been thought to be defective, with no possible role in resumption of the disease.

Siliciano, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, says his team's latest study findings pose a serious problem to prevailing hopes for the so-called "shock and kill" approach to curing HIV.

That approach refers to forcing dormant proviruses to "turn back on," making them "visible" and vulnerable to the immune system's cytolytic "killer" T cells, and then eliminating every last infected cell from the body while antiretroviral drugs prevent any new cells from becoming infected.

Siliciano says this new discovery could boost support for alternative approaches to a cure, including renewed efforts to develop a therapeutic vaccine to stimulate immune system cells that attack and kill all HIV. "Our study results certainly show that finding a cure for HIV disease is going to be much harder than we had thought and hoped for," he says.

Lead study investigator and Johns Hopkins postdoctoral fellow Ya-Chi Ho, M.D., Ph.D., says the team's investigation of "the true size" of the latent reservoir was prompted by a large discrepancy between the two established techniques for measuring how much provirus is in immune system cells. She says the team's original method of calculating only reactivated proviruses yielded numbers that were 300-fold lower than a DNA-based technique used to gauge how many total proviral copies, both dormant and reactivated, are present. "If medical researchers are ever going to lure out and reactivate latent HIV, then we need to better understand exactly how much of it is really there," says Ho.

Read more from the original source:
Curing HIV/AIDS gets tougher: Far more 'hidden' active virus than thought