Help find a cure for HIV/AIDS

Dear Friends,

The month of December is a special month for the HIV/AIDS community around the world and for AIDS Research Alliance. Every December 1 World AIDS Day is commemorated around the globe. This year AIDS Research Alliance hosted our inaugural World AIDS Day Concert at The Colburn School. Keynote speaker Dr. David Hardy, Director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, gave the keynote address. Of special significance to AIDS Research Alliance were Dr. Hardy's favorable remarks about prostratin and our cure strategy.

Since the last report, we continued to mobilize interest and support for prostratin and will begin conversations with Kaiser Permanente in 2013 about a potential partnership focused on HIV/AIDS reservior eradication research. We remain optimistic that prostratin will activate the hidden virus from actual infected patients.

I wanted to share with you an encouraging article published on prostratin research this month. Articles like this is a reaffirmation that we are pursuing a valid strategy in the eradication of HIV. Please see the article link below.

I also would like to use this opportunity to let you know our project is now published in the GlobalGiving UK page. If you happen to have friends and/or relatives living in the UK they can contribute to our project too by visiting our UK page at http://www.globalgiving.co.uk/projects/help-cure-aids. Donations from the UK will help us achieve our financial goal to complete this project in 2013.

Words cannot express how important your support is to our ability to conduct HIV/AIDS research. Thank you for a good year.

With warm wishes for this holiday season,

Steve

Links:

• Prostratin exhibits both replication enhancing and...

Dear Friends,

We are six months away from performing the “leukapheresis” procedure on HIV positive study volunteers.  As you may recall, in order to gauge how efficiently prostratin activates the hidden virus from actual infected patients, we need to facilitate the extraction of a patient's reservoir cells needed to conduct our studies.

With the donations we received from you last April, we now have the funds to perform 1 of 8 expected “leukapheresis” procedures. Each procedure cost about $4,000. But before we are ready for the “leukapheresis” itself, we have some important preparations underway. 

1. Re-agents have been ordered and received by the NIH HIV re-agent program
2. Lab equipment has been sterilized
3. The next step is to sterilize the cell growth equipment (incubators) and that takes about a week
4. Then cell lines need to be ordered from the NIH HIV re-agent program
5. Cell lines need to be proliferated and split and then re-aliquoted and frozen in liquid nitrogen

Once we have the lab completely prepared and the cell lines arrive, our team will spend the next six months conducting FDA-requested experiments, which will determine whether or not prostratin interferes with commonly used HIV medications. Based on everything we have seen to date, our prediction is that prostratin will not interfere with HIV medications, but we are eager to conduct and finalize the experiments so that we can move closer to clinical trials.

Thank you for supporting our research -- together, we are moving the world closer to a cure.

Sincerely,

Steve

Links:

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