IAS 2011: abstracts, slides and webcasts from Rome

The 6th IAS Conference on HIV Pathogenesis, Treatment and Prevention was held in Rome last week from 17-20 July. This meeting is held every two years and alternates with the much larger World AIDS Conferences also organised by the International AIDS Society (IAS).

The meetings is largely available online. All the study abstracts are on a searchable web database. Many of the powerpoint slides are also online. Many of the most important lectures and presentations are also available as webcasts from the conference website.

The ‘Programme at a glance‘ can be searched for key words but will probably require your computer to download an update called Silverlight which is quick and easy to do. Then from this page you can search abstracts or presentations.

Sessions with powerpoint slides or webcasts have relevant icons next to them. As with previous years, for powerpoint downloads scroll down to the bottom of the session page as the powerpoint links on the left under the session time are not active. This is confusing oversight that seems to be establishing a tradition.

1) Treatment as prevention – most notably in a study called HPTN-052 but also in several PEP/PrEP studies. In HPTN HIV-positive people starting treatment with CD4 counts between 350-550 reduced the risk of their HIV negative partners catching HIV by over 95% compared to people waiting until their CD4 count was 250.

The Treatment Is Prevention session include links to abstracts, slides and webcasts from the HPTN-052 study.

2) Cure and eradication research – lots of drive for this research that included overviews of the different ways that this could be approached and preliminary results for early potential targets. Unfortunately very few of the lectures in these sessions are webcast. However, the overview by Anthony Fauci, one of the US top scientists is online and worth watching.

The reluctance of the many of the other cure researchers to give permission to broadcast their talks is perhaps an ominous sign that this is likely to still be a few years away…

3) New drugs – in additional to the launch of the i-Base/TAG 2011 pipeline report there were oral presentations on new integrase inhibitors (elvitegravir and dolutegravir) and NNRTIs (lersivirine), using of HSV drugs (acyclovir/valacyclovir) and currently approved meds (maraviroc. atazanavir etc). Plus, also in the late breaker session, an exciting new rapid antibody test for cryptococcal meningitis developed in the UK that can be used at point of care.

All these and more will be reported in detail in the next issues of HTB and HTB South.