Help find a cure for HIV/AIDS

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:

• Over 1,000 people are talking about this! Join our FB page!