TasP (Treatment as Prevention) – a term to emphasise the impact that HIV drugs (ART) has on dramatically reducing the chance of HIV transmission.
ART is firstly for the health of the HIV positive person. But having an undetectable viral load on ART makes it so difficult to transmit HIV that the risk gets so close to zero that it is effectively zero.
For example, in the PARTNER study, nearly 900 couples had sex more than 58,000 times without condoms, without any transmissions. Each couple included one person who was HIV positive with an undetectable viral load on ART and one person who was HIV negative. ZERO transmissions.
tropism – the type of coreceptor used by HIV in order to attach to and then infect a cell. If HIV uses the CCR5 coreceptor on the surface of the a CD4 cell it is called R5-tropic. If it uses the CXCR4 co receptor it is called R4-tropic). Early HIV infection is usually R5-tropic but over time, especially in late disease (if CD4 counts drop to less than 50 cells/mm3) the virus shifts to being X4-tropic. Mixed tropic refers to a having some viruses that use R5 and some that use X4.
bDNA – branched DNA. A type of viral load test.
nanotechnology – science working with tiny particles at the level of manipulating individual molecules. This is an exciting field of medicine. Drugs developed with nanotechnology would need much lower drug doses (hopefully cheaper and having fewer side effects) and would be longer lasting (perhaps being taken every2–4 weeks).
nucleotide – the building blocks of the genetic code (DNA/RNA). Also called a base.
