News

Watch Dr. Ho explain how antivirals might only be effective for early stage treatment of COVID-19. KOMO News 4 of Seattle covered the story. For the full talk, follow the link.

Dr. Ho discussed some of the complications of treating COVID-19 with vaccines and therapeutics with USA Today in an article by Elizabeth Wise titled “Scientists chase two fronts in how to treat coronavirus, but ‘there’s no magic drug right now.'” For the whole story, follow the link.

Salon’s Nicole Karlis interviewed Dr. Ho about the history of chloroquine and hyroxychloroquine, what role they could play in treating COVID-19, and the possible side effects. For the whole interview follow the link.

Dr. Ho contributed to an article by Geekwire’s Karina Mazhukhina on hydroxychloroquine as a potential treatment for COVID-19. For the whole story, titled “UW treating COVID-19 patients with antimalarial drug—researcher calls it ‘very promising,'” follow the link.

Dr. Simone Perazzolo, a scientist in the TLC-ART Program, was featured on Italian national TV explaining how an FDA approved protease inhibitor called Lopinavir (Kaletra) may be effective against Covid-19 since requires protease enzymes to replicate.

The 3rd Long-Acting Injectables and Implantables Conference (LAII 2020) in La Jolla yesterday and today is covering cutting edge developments in pharmaceutics, including TLC-ART’s newly funded Global Long-Acting Drug (GLAD) Project, transforming daily oral tenofovir-lamivudine-dolutegravir (TLD) pills into a long-acting injectable product for global access.

Unitaid, a hosted funding partner of the WHO, announced investment in the TLC-ART drug-combination nanoparticle platform technology to transform current short-acting HIV drug combinations into long-acting medicines to simplify treatment for people living with HIV. 

Recent work by our TLC-ART team members revealed that effectiveness and frequency are the two key factors affecting patent and consumer acceptability criteria of long-acting antiretroviral therapy. Even so, effectiveness has the highest significance (p=0.0005).

Professors Susan Graham (Global Health and Medicine) and Jane Simoni (Psychology) have recently received NIH grant support to study consumer and advocate preferences for long-acting injectable anti-retroviral therapies for HIV in both the United States (Seattle and Atlanta) and Kenya (Nairobi).

TLC-ART has proposed and received NIH funding to begin human testing of our 3-drug combination HIV medicines. Current long-acting HIV treatments use only one drug. TLC-ART’s goal is to transform short-acting HIV drugs into long-acting combinations that target the virus in the blood and lymphs.