HIV was discovered 25 years ago this Monday. At a three-day meeting at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, AIDS experts reviewed medical progress and called for new ideas, young talent, as well as more funds to invigorate the war against AIDS.
Successes in the fight include the swift identification of the virus and the advent of the "triple cocktail" of drugs in the mid-1990s, which transformed AIDS treatment and patient survival.
Setbacks include the lack of an AIDS vaccine or an HIV-blocking vaginal gel to protect women. These failures show that basic questions remain to be answered about HIV's properties and how it invades immune cells, participants said.
"We still don't completely understand the various forms of the virus," said France's Luc Montagnier, who with Robert Gallo of the United States identified HIV as the cause of AIDS.
"We need to go back to the question of basic research, to have new ideas, new teams, to take a new look at cellular biology," said Jean-Francois Delfraissy, director of France's National Agency for AIDS Research (ANRS).
Alice Dautry, head of the Pasteur Institute, said the next phase of AIDS research needs a "multidisciplinary approach, for looking at the problem through different eyes."
Gallo called for rethinking vaccine strategies. "Some fundamental biological questions are needed [to be addressed] before some vaccines go forward, or we tend to waste money, produce a depressing atmosphere in the field, and take money away from the basic science that is needed right now," he said.
Gallo also attacked a tendency for people to sideline AIDS as a manageable disease in the age of antiretroviral drugs. He pointed out that only a fraction of people living in Africa who need treatment actually receive it.
05/19/08
GLOBAL: Call for Fresh Thinking as AIDS Pandemic Marks Quarter Century
Source: Agence France Presse:: Richard Ingham; Courtesy of the CDC National Center for HIV, STD, and TB Prevention