The November 1, 2010 supplement to the Journal of Infectious Diseases features a suite of articles about individuals who remain HIV negative despite repeated exposure to the virus. The articles represent summaries of oral presentations given at the International Symposium on Natural Immunity to HIV that was held in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, in November 2009. The potential importance of studying highly exposed but seronegative individuals was emphasized by Gregg Gonsalves in a report on HIV basic science that TAG issued in 1993; seventeen years later, a concerted effort appears to be underway to better understand the phenomenon and glean lessons for designing biomedical prevention approaches (particularly vaccines). There has already been a follow-up to the Winnipeg meeting: in July of this year, the National Institutes of Health sponsored a workshop in Rockville to further discuss the formation of an international research consortium (the workshop agenda is available online).
Unfortunately the JID supplement is not open access, the content will become freely available after 12 months (I emailed the journal to politely lobby for lifting the subscriber restriction, to no avail). However a report from the Winnipeg symposium that describes key presentations and outlines the consortium model was prepared by the International Center for Infectious Diseases and is posted to their website.
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