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In the opening session of today's meeting, Daniel Kuritzkes from the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center reviewed the critical issues facing PWA's and providers in the area of HIV treatment. While no new ground was covered, the presentation provided an outstanding overview of the unresolved questions facing people today in the era of HAART, and addressed three broad areas of critical importance to the future of HIV treatment. In his opening remarks, Dr. Kuritzkes outlined the unresolved questions we are facing today:
- When to start HIV therapy?
- What drug combinations to start with?
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- When to switch drug combinations?
- How to use resistance testing in making decisions?
- How to manage the toxicity of long-term use of HIV drugs?
Dr. Kuritzkes went on to define three critical issues in the area of HIV treatment:
- The existence of latent viral reservoirs, and the role this latent viral material plays in ongoing viral replication and viral rebound. And further, the need to understand how the latent viral reservoir is maintained.
- The use and efficacy of structured treatment interruptions, with the need to determine if such interruptions will be part of a long-term strategy of treatment and if virus-specific immune responses can be permanently elicited.
- Discordant CD4 cell response in the presence of viral rebound and the correlation between the magnitude of viral suppression and an increase in CD4 cells.
In each of these three areas, Dr. Kuritzkes reviewed the treatment implications that need to be addressed for the future -- including development of more potent drugs, using more aggressive therapy with existing drugs (i.e., mega-HAART-using five or more drugs in a combination), and the need to understand how to secure a long-term immunologic boost.
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Please note: Knowledge about HIV changes rapidly. Note the date of this summary's publication, and before treating patients or employing any therapies described in these materials, verify all information independently. If you are a patient, please consult a doctor or other medical professional before acting on any of the information presented in this summary. For a complete listing of our most recent conference coverage, click here.
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This article was provided by Seattle Treatment Education Project. 
