Correspondence Highlights from the 13th European AIDS Conference (EACS) Gordana Dragović1*, Djordje Jevtović2 1
From 12-15th October 2011, the 13th European AIDS Conference/EACS took place in Belgrade, Serbia (www.eacs-conference2011.com) at the Sava Center.
The conference was organized under the auspices of the European AIDS Clinical Society (EACS), a nonprofit group of European physicians, clinicians, and researchers dealing with the clinical management of HIV (www.europeanaidsclinicalsociety.org). This year’s biennial EACS conference was the largest European HIV/AIDS meeting in Received: 17 November 2011; accepted: 28 November 2011 1 MD, PhD, Institute of Pharmacology, Clinical Pharmacology and Toxicology, Associate Professor, School of Medicine, University of Belgrade, Dr Subotica 1/III, P.O. Box 38; 11000 Belgrade, Serbia 2
MD, PhD, Institute of Infective and Tropical Disease ‘Dr Kosta Todorović’, Professor, School of Medicine, University of Belgrade, Bulevar oslobodjenja 16, 11000 Belgrade, Serbia *Corresponding author: Gordana Dragović, MD, PhD, Institute of Pharmacology, Clinical Pharmacology and Toxicology, Associate Professor, School of Medicine, University of Belgrade, Dr Subotica 1/III, P.O. Box 38; 11000 Belgrade, Serbia, [email protected] Article downloaded from www.germs.ro; published on 24 December 2011 © GERMS 2011 ISSN 2248 – 2997 ISSN – L = 2248 – 2997
2011, with 2633 participants in total, coming from 79 different countries from the world. The majority of participants were predominantly from United Kingdom, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, as well as from Russian Federation, Portugal, Belgium, Switzerland and United States. More than ever, there were also participants from the South-Eastern/Eastern Europe such as Romania, Greece, Turkey, Hungary together with all exYugoslavia countries. A well balanced mix of plenary lectures and abstract driven sessions presented the latest research in the field of HIV medicine. Briefly, topics of the plenary lectures included: ‘HIV and human rights’, ‘Estimating the HIV epidemic in Europe’, ‘Barriers and needs for optimal HIV care’, ‘PrEP-ready for implementation?’, ‘Advances in managing TB in those with HIV’, ‘Managing HIV when resources are limited’ jointly organized with the European AIDS Treatment Group (EATG), ‘Towards an HIV cure’, jointly organized with the International AIDS Society (IAS), ‘Starting antiretroviral therapy in 2011’, ‘Looking beyond plasma undetectability‘, ‘Neurocognitive disorders in HIV‘ jointly organized with the Forum for collaborative HIV research, ‘The best of basic science for HIV clinicians in the last year’, ‘Treatment of HIV/HCV co-infection – A new frontier’. For this year’s EACS conference there were 583 submitted abstracts. Some 360 abstracts were accepted for the presentation and out of that number 64 abstracts were selected for the oral presentation and 8 for the best poster presentation. In general, the 13th European AIDS Conference was a right place for an active dialogue between researches, clinicians and various other relevant stakeholders together with over 70 journalists across the world as vital factor in creating awareness and education.
www.germs.ro • GERMS 1(1) • December 2011 • page 9
EACS Conference 2011 - Dragović et al.•Correspondence With many unsolved questions, the HIV epidemic still remains one of the main public health challenges of our time, particularly in lowand middle-income countries. Due to recent advances and developments in access to antiretroviral therapy (ART), HIV-positive people now live longer and healthier lives. In order to reach this goal, all new results of the clinical and basic science research will be presented at the 14th European AIDS Conference which will take place in Brussels, Belgium between 16-19th October 2013.
New HIV treatment guidelines During a special session, new EACS HIV treatment guidelines were presented. The latest version of the European AIDS Clinical Society guidelines give special emphasis to comorbid conditions that may occur in patients infected with HIV. This focus on comorbid conditions constitutes a major revision to the previous set of guidelines, issued in 2009. The most recent version, 6.1, is available at www.europeanaidsclinicalsociety.org in English and in several other languages. PrEP-ready for implementation At the plenary session on the second conference day Dr. Kenneth Mayer, Director of HIV Prevention Research at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Visiting Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School as well as Medical Research Director at the Fenway
Institute (Fenway Health, Boston, US), described the implementation of the approach known as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). Dr. Kenneth Mayer presented the potential impact of PrEP in lowering HIV infection, especially in high-risk individuals who take a single daily anti-HIV pill and showed that the risk ratios dramatically lowered the risk of HIV infection, saving millions of lives worldwide. Given the fact that for both treatment and prevention, we are currently considering using the same technology – antiretroviral therapy, Dr. Mayer raised the question of delivery, discussing when and how ART is best supplied as prevention. Towards an HIV cure Dr. Alain Lafeuillade (Department of Infectious Diseases, General Hospital, Toulon, France) described the 2 kinds of HIV cure: the functional one and the sterilizing cure (the ‘Berlin Patient’) and also discussed about the ideal moment in the natural history of HIV disease for testing eradication strategies, stressing on the importance of protecting the uninfected cells from cell-to-cell transmission. Dr. Alain Lafeuillade put things into perspective by saying that 15 years after the discovery of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART), an HIV cure is no longer a tabu in the field due to the initiative ‘Towards an HIV cure’ driven by Professor Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Professor Steven Deeks. Starting antiretroviral therapy in 2011 Professor José M Gatell (Hospital Clinic, Barcelona, Spain) started his talk by saying that up until a couple of years ago, when we talked about starting antiretrovirals, we almost exclusively thought about HIV infected patients but we have recently realized that antiretrovirals may also play a role in the population and in avoiding transmission. Professor José Gatell presented an approach to ART in HIV-infected persons: when and what to start both for the benefit of the individual and for public health reasons (minimizing transmission) in resourcerich settings. He discussed nuke sparing/saving regimens and also presented some data on PrEP.
www.germs.ro • GERMS 1(1) • December 2011 • page 10
EACS Conference 2011 - Dragović et al.•Correspondence Looking beyond plasma undetectability Professor Christine Katlama (University Pierre et Marie Curie Paris VI, Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, Paris, France) discussed HIV as a success story of research that is yet to be achieved, stressing on the fact that not only controlled suppression is important for the survival of the individual person and that ART also decreases the risk of infection transmission. Professor
Christine Katlama described HIV/AIDS as a viremic disease that needs to be controlled from the very beginning, the control of HIV replication being necessary for preventing HIVinduced damages early and disease progression in every HIV infected individual. Professor Katlama also addressed in detail the obstacles to HIV eradication: persistence of immune activation, residual replication and HIV reservoirs latency.
Please cite this article as: Dragović G, Jevtović D. Highlights from the 13th European AIDS Conference (EACS). GERMS. 2011;1(1): 9-11
www.germs.ro • GERMS 1(1) • December 2011 • page 11
From 12-15th October 2011, the 13th European AIDS Conference/EACS took place in Belgrade, Serbia (www.eacs-conference2011.com) at the Sava Center.
The conference was organized under the auspices of the European AIDS Clinical Society (EACS), a nonprofit group of European physicians, clinicians, and researchers dealing with the clinical management of HIV (www.europeanaidsclinicalsociety.org). This year’s biennial EACS conference was the largest European HIV/AIDS meeting in Received: 17 November 2011; accepted: 28 November 2011 1 MD, PhD, Institute of Pharmacology, Clinical Pharmacology and Toxicology, Associate Professor, School of Medicine, University of Belgrade, Dr Subotica 1/III, P.O. Box 38; 11000 Belgrade, Serbia 2
MD, PhD, Institute of Infective and Tropical Disease ‘Dr Kosta Todorović’, Professor, School of Medicine, University of Belgrade, Bulevar oslobodjenja 16, 11000 Belgrade, Serbia *Corresponding author: Gordana Dragović, MD, PhD, Institute of Pharmacology, Clinical Pharmacology and Toxicology, Associate Professor, School of Medicine, University of Belgrade, Dr Subotica 1/III, P.O. Box 38; 11000 Belgrade, Serbia, [email protected] Article downloaded from www.germs.ro; published on 24 December 2011 © GERMS 2011 ISSN 2248 – 2997 ISSN – L = 2248 – 2997
2011, with 2633 participants in total, coming from 79 different countries from the world. The majority of participants were predominantly from United Kingdom, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, as well as from Russian Federation, Portugal, Belgium, Switzerland and United States. More than ever, there were also participants from the South-Eastern/Eastern Europe such as Romania, Greece, Turkey, Hungary together with all exYugoslavia countries. A well balanced mix of plenary lectures and abstract driven sessions presented the latest research in the field of HIV medicine. Briefly, topics of the plenary lectures included: ‘HIV and human rights’, ‘Estimating the HIV epidemic in Europe’, ‘Barriers and needs for optimal HIV care’, ‘PrEP-ready for implementation?’, ‘Advances in managing TB in those with HIV’, ‘Managing HIV when resources are limited’ jointly organized with the European AIDS Treatment Group (EATG), ‘Towards an HIV cure’, jointly organized with the International AIDS Society (IAS), ‘Starting antiretroviral therapy in 2011’, ‘Looking beyond plasma undetectability‘, ‘Neurocognitive disorders in HIV‘ jointly organized with the Forum for collaborative HIV research, ‘The best of basic science for HIV clinicians in the last year’, ‘Treatment of HIV/HCV co-infection – A new frontier’. For this year’s EACS conference there were 583 submitted abstracts. Some 360 abstracts were accepted for the presentation and out of that number 64 abstracts were selected for the oral presentation and 8 for the best poster presentation. In general, the 13th European AIDS Conference was a right place for an active dialogue between researches, clinicians and various other relevant stakeholders together with over 70 journalists across the world as vital factor in creating awareness and education.
www.germs.ro • GERMS 1(1) • December 2011 • page 9
EACS Conference 2011 - Dragović et al.•Correspondence With many unsolved questions, the HIV epidemic still remains one of the main public health challenges of our time, particularly in lowand middle-income countries. Due to recent advances and developments in access to antiretroviral therapy (ART), HIV-positive people now live longer and healthier lives. In order to reach this goal, all new results of the clinical and basic science research will be presented at the 14th European AIDS Conference which will take place in Brussels, Belgium between 16-19th October 2013.
New HIV treatment guidelines During a special session, new EACS HIV treatment guidelines were presented. The latest version of the European AIDS Clinical Society guidelines give special emphasis to comorbid conditions that may occur in patients infected with HIV. This focus on comorbid conditions constitutes a major revision to the previous set of guidelines, issued in 2009. The most recent version, 6.1, is available at www.europeanaidsclinicalsociety.org in English and in several other languages. PrEP-ready for implementation At the plenary session on the second conference day Dr. Kenneth Mayer, Director of HIV Prevention Research at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Visiting Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School as well as Medical Research Director at the Fenway
Institute (Fenway Health, Boston, US), described the implementation of the approach known as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). Dr. Kenneth Mayer presented the potential impact of PrEP in lowering HIV infection, especially in high-risk individuals who take a single daily anti-HIV pill and showed that the risk ratios dramatically lowered the risk of HIV infection, saving millions of lives worldwide. Given the fact that for both treatment and prevention, we are currently considering using the same technology – antiretroviral therapy, Dr. Mayer raised the question of delivery, discussing when and how ART is best supplied as prevention. Towards an HIV cure Dr. Alain Lafeuillade (Department of Infectious Diseases, General Hospital, Toulon, France) described the 2 kinds of HIV cure: the functional one and the sterilizing cure (the ‘Berlin Patient’) and also discussed about the ideal moment in the natural history of HIV disease for testing eradication strategies, stressing on the importance of protecting the uninfected cells from cell-to-cell transmission. Dr. Alain Lafeuillade put things into perspective by saying that 15 years after the discovery of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART), an HIV cure is no longer a tabu in the field due to the initiative ‘Towards an HIV cure’ driven by Professor Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Professor Steven Deeks. Starting antiretroviral therapy in 2011 Professor José M Gatell (Hospital Clinic, Barcelona, Spain) started his talk by saying that up until a couple of years ago, when we talked about starting antiretrovirals, we almost exclusively thought about HIV infected patients but we have recently realized that antiretrovirals may also play a role in the population and in avoiding transmission. Professor José Gatell presented an approach to ART in HIV-infected persons: when and what to start both for the benefit of the individual and for public health reasons (minimizing transmission) in resourcerich settings. He discussed nuke sparing/saving regimens and also presented some data on PrEP.
www.germs.ro • GERMS 1(1) • December 2011 • page 10
EACS Conference 2011 - Dragović et al.•Correspondence Looking beyond plasma undetectability Professor Christine Katlama (University Pierre et Marie Curie Paris VI, Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, Paris, France) discussed HIV as a success story of research that is yet to be achieved, stressing on the fact that not only controlled suppression is important for the survival of the individual person and that ART also decreases the risk of infection transmission. Professor
Christine Katlama described HIV/AIDS as a viremic disease that needs to be controlled from the very beginning, the control of HIV replication being necessary for preventing HIVinduced damages early and disease progression in every HIV infected individual. Professor Katlama also addressed in detail the obstacles to HIV eradication: persistence of immune activation, residual replication and HIV reservoirs latency.
Please cite this article as: Dragović G, Jevtović D. Highlights from the 13th European AIDS Conference (EACS). GERMS. 2011;1(1): 9-11
www.germs.ro • GERMS 1(1) • December 2011 • page 11
