UCLA LEADS THE WAY

From the earliest days of the AIDS pandemic, UCLA has been at the forefront of HIV research. Indeed, it was a team of UCLA physicians who first described AIDS as a distinct disease entity, more than twenty years ago, and since then UCLA researchers have been first to

• describe why early AIDS drugs failed
• report a case of HIV transmission through breast milk—in patient Ariel Glaser, daughter of Paul and Elizabeth Glaser
• show that activation of “resting” HIV is necessary for viral replication
• describe acute HIV infection
• Demonstrate clearance of HIV from an infected infant
• identify, clone, and characterize HIV isolates in the brain
• document that, contrary to expectation, African-American women are more likely to take their HIV medications than are Latinas, Asians and Pacific Islanders, and American Indians
• discover that some individuals are wholly or partially resistant to HIV infection
• demonstrate the efficacy of HIV medications in adolescents
• report the epidemic of HIV infection among plasma donors in China
• elucidate the epidemiology of HIV in Brazil
• report outcomes from the largest randomized prevention trial conducted in the United States
• demonstrate the utility of "prevention for positives"
• show that the adult thymus can help rebuild an HIV-ravaged immune system
• reveal that risk patterns among young gay men change over time
• conduct studies of hematopoietic growth factors in seropositive patients with anemia and neutropenia
• conduct studies designed to promote risk-reduction among serodiscordant African-American couples

In addition, UCLA researchers were among the very first to

• develop an animal model for HIV, thereby enabling scientists to test new drug therapies
• demonstrate the clinical activity of AZT (zidovudine) in HIV-positive patients
• show the efficacy of protease inhibitors in children
• demonstrate that decreased levels of CD4 cells and increased levels of CD8 cells are associated with HIV infection
• devise treatments for patients who don’t respond to standard multidrug
  HIV therapy
• reduce mother-to-child transmission rates by pioneering the use of the drug AZT in HIV-positive pregnant women
• propose a theoretically feasible model for eradicating HIV from the body
• demonstrate the efficacy of alpha interferon as treatment for AIDS-related Kaposi’s sarcoma
• describe hypersensitivity to TMP-SMZ (Bactrim) in patients with HIV
• elucidate the heightened risk of cardiovascular events in male and female patients receiving antiretroviral therapy
• demonstrate the feasibility of stem-cell gene therapy in HIV
• examine patients’ attitudes toward stem-cell-based therapies
• show that even in persons who respond well to multidrug antiretroviral therapy, increases in CD4 cell count are more modest in older patients