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The results of the study are published online in  JAMA Internal Medicine . The research team, led by Wafaa El-Sadr, MD, MPH, director of ICAP and professor of Epidemiology and Medicine at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, evaluated the effectiveness of financial incentives on linkage to care, defined as the proportion of HIV-positive individuals at the test site linked to care within three months, and viral suppression in HIV-positive patients, defined as the proportion of established patients at HIV care sites with a suppressed viral load less than 400 copies/mL and assessed quarterly. The financial incentives offered were a $25 coupon redeemable within three months for getting blood drawn for HIV-related tests and $100 for meeting with a clinician and developing a care plan for individuals who tested HIV-positive at a financial incentive test site. HIV-positive patients receiving antiretroviral therapy at a financial incentive care site and engaged in...

The group that developed the model -- led by PhD student Weston Roda and Michael Li, a professor in the Department of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences -- used data from patients who died five to 15 years after they were infected, as well as known biological processes for the HIV virus to build the model that predicts the growth and progression of HIV in the brain, from the moment of infection onward. It is the first model of an infectious disease in the brain. HIV infection in the brain has been a proverbial black box for scientists since the development of antiretroviral therapy in the 1990s. "The nature of the HIV virus allows it to travel across the blood-brain barrier in infected macrophage -- or white blood cell -- as early as two weeks after infection. Antiretroviral drugs, the therapy of choice for HIV, cannot enter the brain so easily," said Roda. This creates what is known as a viral reservoir, a place in the body where the virus can lay dormant and is r...

The CCNY research led by Mahesh K. Lakshman, vice chair of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Ph.D. student Hari Akula, focuses on the modification of nucleosides. These are genetic building materials in all living organisms and because of this they possess great potential as antiviral agents. The ability to rapidly modify the structures of natural nucleosides is at the core of developing potential pharmaceutical agents. This is likely to yield diverse compounds that can then be tested to gain insight into structural effects on biological activity. "Such is the case with modifying pyrimidine nucleosides, including AZT ( zidovudine ), a drug used in the control of HIV infections," said Lakshman, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. In this context, Lakshman and Akula have developed a simple and fast method for preparing new pyrimidine nucleoside analogues, a family in which AZT belongs, and for modifying AZT itself. Along with their collaborators at ...