Results of a promising HIV vaccine will be announced.
An American man made international headlines this month when German doctors announced he had been cured of the virus that causes AIDS. The HIV-positive man had suffered from acute myeloid leukemia - a deadly blood cancer - so in 2007 the doctors performed a bone marrow transplant to treat the leukemia. They were lucky enough to find a bone marrow donor with a rare mutation, called Delta 32 that provides natural resistance to the human immunodeficiency virus.
Health and Medicine Major Advances 2011
Three years after the transplant, the man continued to show no signs of HIV.
But for all the media attention to this case, another scientific advance is likely to help more people battle HIV and AIDS in 2011.
In 2009, studies in Thailand showed a vaccine could reduce the risk of contracting HIV by about 30 percent. Dr. Susan Zolla-Pazner, an HIV researcher at the New York University Langone Medical Center in New York City, said it was the first sign of real success for an HIV vaccine, and a guide to future research. “It was the first and only light in a very dark tunnel that suggested that we were beginning to get off of home plate in terms of making any progress,” Zolla-Pazner said.
Reflecting on the case of the German achievement, Zolla-Pazner pointed out that only a tiny fraction of HIV patients would be able to find matching bone marrow from a naturally resistant donor, and even then, those patients would risk dying from the bone marrow transplant procedure.
Health and Medicine Major Advances 2011
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