Topics and Expertise: HIV

New research support awarded to the UCSF School of Pharmacy by the National Institutes of Health during the 2011 fiscal year included these on-going projects by faculty in the Department of Clinical Pharmacy:

How do you convince patients who feel fine to take medicines that can have major side effects?

How can you help them stay on their lifesaving daily medications for years to come despite the obstacle course of everyday life?

Table of contents


Introduction
Budget significance
Reasons for past success
A decade of funding for bioinformatics
New drug discovery directions attract support

A team of scientists from UCSF and colleagues have identified a new potential drug target for the herpes virus that causes Kaposi’s sarcoma. Their research reopens the possibility of using a class of drugs called protease inhibitors, against diseases ranging from cancer to Alzheimer's Disease.

From the time the antiretroviral therapy AZT was introduced in the 1980s to treat AIDS, the drug demanded close patient monitoring to be effective. AZT had many side effects and strict requirements for how and when to take it. Misuse of the drug could lead to viral resistance.

UCSF leaders in pharmacy, international health, and AIDS met with their Vietnamese peers in Hanoi this October to plan how Vietnam's pharmacy workforce can curtail the spread of HIV in Vietnam.