Buenos Aires Conference on Treatment and Research: Web Reports Available.

A new scientific conference created by the International AIDS Society (IAS) took place July 8-11 in Buenos Aires. Even before the first meeting, the 1st IAS Conference on Pathogenesis and Treatment had emerged as an important conference, with about 3,000 scientists attending and 748 scientific presentations (out of about 1,000 submitted); you can read abstracts of the presentations through the Web links below. This conference will occur every two years, during the odd numbered years when there is no international AIDS conference.

The IAS created the new meeting to focus mainly on basic and clinical science and the interaction between them -- including new treatments, vaccines, studies of pathogenesis, and how research can contribute to making good prevention, treatment and care available to the approximately 90% of persons with HIV who currently do not have access because they live in poor countries. The scheduled keynote and plenary speakers were:

David Ho: Learning Basic Science from Clinical Trials

Julio Montaner: Current Controversies in Antiretroviral Treatment

Stefano Vella: Fostering Access to HIV Treatment

Anthony Fauci: Immunopathogenesis of HIV

Disease: Host Factors in Pathogenesis of HIV

Disease: Implications for Therapeutic Strategies

Francoise Barre-Sinoussi: HIV: Twenty Years After the Discovery of the AIDS Epidemic

Margaret Johnston: Virologic and Immunologic Concepts in Vaccine Design

Brigitte Autran: Immune Reconstitution: Translating Immunologic Knowledge into Therapy

Eric Hunter: The Next Target in Therapy: Viral Entry

Ashley Haase: Virologic and Immunologic Concepts on HIV Transmission

David Cooper: Antiretroviral Therapy Toxicity: The Second Round, Beyond Lipodystrophy 

John Mellors: Resistance: From Molecular Basis to Clinical Research

In addition, the U.S. National Institutes of Health organized a one-day meeting the day before the conference on "Formulating a Comprehensive HIV/AIDS Research Agenda in Resource-Poor Setting."

AIDS Treatment News did not attend this meeting. In future issues we may summarize some of the presentations. Meanwhile, extensive reports are available on the Web.

Web Access

The LAS has named Medscape as the official provider of online conference coverage for this meeting. The Medscape site for this conference can be reached through a link on the Medscape home page, http://www.medscape.com.

The official Conference site, which has background information on the conference, is: http://www.aids2001ias.org.

You can search and read the abstracts of the conference by reaching a search page through the IAS home page: http://www.ias.se.

(At this time the search function is confusing. You do not need to log in with a user name and password in order to search or read these conference abstracts. We have not yet been able to do an 'and' search (it does an 'or' instead) -- but with fewer than a thousand abstracts, one can live with that. So far we have not found a link from the Buenos Aires conference page, only from the IAS home page -- nor have we found a link to instructions for more advanced searches. We hope these glitches will be corrected.)