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Delays cost Chinese-born University of Toronto graduate students visas

Efforts are not where they could be, say participants at NAS convocation

So far, 80 therapeutic agents are on the market to treat and prevent HIV/AIDS.Figure 1There are 83 medicines – including 15 vaccines – currently in clinical trials or awaiting Food and Drug Administration approval.Figure 2From a survey conducted by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association http://www.phrma.org/newmedicines/resources/2003-11-23.119.pdfGo to http://www.the-scientist.com/snapshot.htm to give us your feedback in the latest survey.

Figure 1My colleagues and I had been working for a number of years to develop a novel therapeutic inhibitor of the HIV-1 protease enzyme. Eventually, a specific and potent inhibitor, indinavir, was developed and brought into Phase I trials in patients persistently infected with the virus. While sitting at home on a dreary, cold winter night in early 1994, I was staring at the figure that depicted the patient's plasma virus levels while on treatment. I was depressed by the observation that most p

Figure 1By November 2003, 40 million people worldwide – 5 million more than the year before – were infected with HIV. In 2003, three million died of AIDS, bringing the total number lost to the epidemic to nearly 32 million people, the size of the population of Canada.This insidious disease continues to prove itself. When this virus turns on, modern medicine can attack and kill, but it cannot cure. HIV hides. It slips inside other cells and waits. It can wait in reservoirs for years,

An ongoing regimen of HAART (highly active antiretroviral therapy) keeps HIV from exploding into AIDS. In the clinic, where patients precisely follow the HAART program, it wipes out detectable virus in more than 90% of patients. In the real world, where patients forget a pill here and there, the success rate falls to 50% or 60%, says Dean Hamer of the National Cancer Institute. In addition, HAART itself creates problems.Few, if any, patients could stay with HAART forever. "There are lots of prob

Figure 1Hope was once high that, over time, antiretroviral therapy would rid patients of HIV-infected cells. Such hopes hinged on the presumption that these drugs could reach any and all HIV reservoirs.That's clearly not the case, as the title of a recent conference in the French West Indies attests: the 1st International Workshop on HIV Persistence during Therapy. "HIV persistently replicates, even in infected patients whose levels of plasma viremia have fallen below detectable levels while on

Camel Antibodies Used to Fight TrypanosomesFigure 1Belgian scientists say that small antibodies taken from the dromedary may prove useful in treating tropical parasites such as the African trypanosome, which causes sleeping sickness. Penetrating the dense, variable-specific surface glycoproteins that coat the organism, such antibodies may be able to zero in on conserved oligosaccharides hidden beneath. Serge Muyl-dermans and colleagues at the University of Brussels demonstrated its use as a diag

Figure 1I did something heinous. After receiving a cup of Dunkin' Donuts Coffea arabica that had clearly exceeded the 15-minute half-life from coffee to sludge, and after abandoning Starbucks where the maker of my venti-no-fat-no-whip-mocha-valencia forgot the shot, I went home and mixed beans from both sources, grinding into intimate contact the helpless slivers of endosperm, mindlessly obliterating the embryos within. I don't know the farmers who grew the brew, whether it was fruity or bold, o