A ''patent pool'' .. could get life-saving drugs to poor folks in Africa.. Some drug makers are resisting




A bold new idea for getting the latest breakthroughs in HIV-fighting medicines to people in poor countries in Africa and Asia will get a big test next week.The idea is called a patent pool........

Now two Syracuse University scientists have developed new brominated furanones that exhibit powerful anti-fungal properties.

The most virulent fungus is Candida albicans, which is carried by about 75 percent of the public. Typically the fungus is harmless but, in individuals with HIV or otherwise compromised immune systems, it can cause candidiasis, which has a high mortality rate.



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South African doctor sees drug-resistant HIV cases rise

At her South Africa clinic, Theresa Rossouw has seen the drugs that once worked so well starting not to work

South Africa - EDITOR'S NOTE — Once-curable diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria are coming back, as germs rapidly mutate to form aggressive strains that resist drugs. The reason: The misuse of the very drugs that were supposed to save us has built updrug resistance
worldwide. Fourth in a five-part series.
It's 8 a.m. and Dr. Theresa Rossouw is already drowning behind a cluttered desk of handwritten HIV charts — new, perplexing cases of patients whose lifesaving drugs have turned against them.
Her cell phone chirps. Her desk phone bleats. She scribbles notes on a planner, spins in her chair, juggles requests about labs and drug regimens.
Rossouw is on the front lines of a new battle in the fight against HIV: The drugs that once worked so well are starting not to work. And now the resistance is showing up in sub-Saharan Africa, home to two-thirds of the world's 33 million HIV cases.
Ten years ago, between 1 percent and 5 percent of HIV patients worldwide had drug resistant strains. Now, between 5 percent and 30 percent of new patients are already resistant to the drugs. In Europe, it's 10 percent; in the U.S., 15 percent

Survival of Children with HIV in the United S...1990s, New Analysis Shows


"... young people with HIV continue to die at 30 times the rate of youth of similar age who do not have HIV"

Surprising Keys to a New Anti-HIV Compound
http://www.amfar.org/lab/article.aspx?id=8326

Now Dr. Bruno Marchand of the University of Missouri, recipient of an amfAR Mathilde Krim Fellowship in Basic Biomedical Research, reports on the mechanism of action of a new type of reverse transcriptase (RT) inhibitor, which holds great potential for development as a novel anti-HIV drug.

Weight for weight, EFdA was almost 500 times more potent than AZT at killing HIV in the test tube. As such, given that it has the 3'-OH structure, it is unique among RT inhibitors that others have developed. For example, entecavir, an RT inhibitor that also contains 3'-OH, is a strong inhibitor of hepatitis B virus but acts only weakly against HIV. Marchand and colleagues concluded, “By understanding the molecular details of RT inhibition by [EFdA], we hope to gain insights into the design of more efficacious inhibitors.”