Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) Starts Sunday in Boston

	SUMMARY: The 18th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI 2011) will take place next week, February 27-March 2, at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston. HIVandHepatitis.com will be bringing you conference coverage starting next Friday.

CROI is among the most prominent international scientific meetings on HIV/AIDS and the major annual HIV conference in the U.S.; many researchers choose it as a venue for presenting their latest findings.

Topics to be covered this year include new antiretroviral drugs and complications of HIV treatment, including cardiovascular disease and bone loss. A session on innovative approaches will feature presentations on a potential functional cure using gene therapy to make CD4 T-cells and hematopoietic stem cells resistant to infection.

CROI 2011 will have a heavy emphasis on biomedical prevention, especially use of oral antiretroviral agents and microbicides to reduce the risk of HIV infection. Several presentations will look in more detail at data from the groundbreaking iPrEx pre-exposure prophylaxis trial.

The conference will also include numerous reports on HIV treatment, care, and prevention in resource-limited settings and among underserved communities both global and domestic.

Finally, there will be more attention on hepatitis C -- as novel direct-acting antiviral agents near approval later this year -- including results from a study of the experimental HCV protease inhibitor telaprevir in HIV/HCV coinfected people.

Starting next Friday and continuing for several issues HIVandHepatitis.com will provide coverage of many of the highlights of the meeting. Abstracts and selected presentations will be available on the conference web site at www.retroconference.org/2011 as content is released from embargo.

2/25/09

Source
18th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (www.retroconference.org/2011).