http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/215497.php

"Article Date: 03 Feb 2011

In The Majority Of AIDS Patients The Viral Load Is Reduced By Therapeutic AIDS Vaccine Designed By HIVACAT
The therapeutic vaccines are a priority research line of the HIVACAT, the catalan programme for the development of therapeutic vaccines and prevention against the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). This type of therapeutic vaccine helps the patients who are carriers of the virus, combat infection and control the appearance of AIDS in the same way as with the current antiretroviral treatments. The final aim of the therapeutic vaccines will be to avoid a life long treatment with antiretroviral drugs. The research team 'Infectious Diseases and AIDS' led by Dr. Josep Maria Gastell from IDIBAPS - Hospital Clinic has developed using the brand HIVACAT, a model of the therapuetic vaccine based on the patient's own dendritic cells. This reduction in the viral load is still considered to be insuficient but it is the first therapeutic vaccine which has achieved a postive response in the majority of patients..."

It appears that IL-7 is the subject of ongoing research. The appended URL lists a number of different IL7 related trials involving HIV positive patients in the United States, Canada, France, Italy, Switzerland, South Africa, Spain, and the United Kingdom

http://www.cytheris.com/Clinical_Trials/hiv.php

Confirmation that the mathematical modeling approach used by research projects such as Fight Against Aids @ Home may be the most effective method yet for finding new drug candidates against HIV.


http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-02/pues-mmh020711.php

"Public release date: 7-Feb-2011

Math may help calculate way to find new drugs for HIV and other diseases

Techique finds best drug candidates among millions of choices

Using mathematical concepts, Princeton researchers have developed a method of discovering new drugs for a range of diseases by calculating which physical properties of biological molecules may predict their effectiveness as medicines.

The technique already has identified several potential new drugs that were shown to be effective for fighting strains of HIV by researchers at Johns Hopkins University.

"The power of this is that it's a general method," said Princeton chemical and biological engineering professor Christodoulos Floudas, who led the research team. "It has proven successful in finding potential peptides to fight HIV, but it should also be effective in searching for drugs for other diseases."

Floudas, the Stephen C. Macaleer '63 Professor in Engineering and Applied Science, and Princeton engineering doctoral student Meghan Bellows-Peterson collaborated on the study with researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Their findings were reported in the Nov. 17, 2010, issue of Biophysical Journal.

The researchers' technique combines concepts from optimization theory, a field of mathematics that focuses on calculating the best option among a number of choices, with those of computational biology, which combines mathematics, statistics and computer science for biology research.

In the case of HIV, the challenge for the Princeton team was to find peptides -- the small chains of biologically active amino acids that are the basic building blocks of proteins -- that could stop the virus from infecting human cells..."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110110154645.htm

New Method Takes Snapshots of Proteins as They Fold

ScienceDaily (Jan. 10, 2011) — Scientists have invented a way to 'watch' proteins fold -- in less than thousandths of a second -- into the elaborate twisted shapes that determine their function. [...] the scientists demonstrated that the new technique can follow folding and unfolding on a submillisecond time scale. [...] this proof-of-principle experiment stands at the end of a long line of elegant experiments of a similar type, called pump-probe experiments. Other techniques probe the change in protein structure by monitoring the absorption or emission of light--or a similar physical effect. They can provide only global information, such as the rate constant of a folding reaction. "Because we use a chemical rather than a physical probe, we can see what's going on in much greater detail," says Gross. "We can say which part of the structure closes first, which second, and so on." [...] Jiawei Chen, Don L. Rempel, Michael L. Gross. Temperature Jump and Fast Photochemical Oxidation Probe Submillisecond Protein Folding. Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2010; 132 (44): 15502 DOI: 10.1021/ja106518d

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/02/x...us-as-it-vaporizes-it.ars

X-ray laser finds structure of a single virus as it vaporizes it

In two Letters in Nature, scientists are reporting that they have been able to reconstruct the structures of biological molecules using femtosecond X-ray pulses. In the first Letter, they imaged nano-crystals of the photosystem I protein, part of the photosynthetic machinery. In the second, they were able to image individual single mimiviruses, part of a family of giant viruses. We seem to be well on the way to single molecule structural imaging. [...] higher energy x-rays and shorter bursts are expected to increase resolution and decrease the size of the sample particles. Plans are already in the works for x-ray lasers 105 times brighter but with pulses lasting less than 10fs.