September 4, 2015
3:00 - 4:00pm Eastern
via The Women's Collective
The journey of women in HIV research has taken a very positive turn in recent years as researchers have been far more open to the input of HIV+ women and their advocates in designing and conducting studies to help overcome knowledge, social and structural barriers that keep women from participating. The GRACE and WAVES studies are two examples in HIV treatment and the WIHS study stands as a decades long example of how to involve women in research.
HIV cure research is in its infancy and we are unfortunately facing some of the same old hurdles in that the needs and concerns of women are not always taken fully into account and HIV+ women and their advocates are needed to help us overcome those hurdles. Funding and grant challenges have also made recruiting women more challenging and advocacy will be needed.
While researchers haven't given up on an out-and-out cure (all traces of HIV are gone), they are more actively seeking to reduce the small traces of sleeping HIV that HIV medications can't reach so much that the drugs can be taken away and the virus stays under control.
One necessary step to reducing that sleeping HIV is to first wake it up so that the body can recognize infected cells and kill them. Just reported research, however, suggests that this might be a lot harder to do in anyone with high levels of estrogen: namely cisgender women and transgender women taking feminizing hormones, and traditionally there have been very few of either in cure studies.
We'd like to share this new data with all people living with HIV and their advocates to help them understand the implications of the research and to discuss how we might empower women to be more involved in early cure research, both as advisors and in some cases participants.
This call will start with a brief presentation by Jonathan Karn, from Case Western University, who presented on the research recently in Vancouver, and be followed by an open discussion for how women and their advocates and allies can work together to help build awareness of cure research among women and to advocate for increased resources to ensure easier participation of women in studies.
Because we will be utilizing a more traditional conference call format rather than a webinar, and will need to send slides in advance of the call, please confirm your interest by filling out this brief survey to receive call-in details and slides.
