诺贝尔奖报告: 艾滋病毒/艾滋病研究之初

In the early eighties, clinicians started to observe a new alarming epidemic. In June 1981 in the United States, they first reported a number of cases of Pneumocystis carinii in homosexual men. Subsequently the first cases of what would later be known as AIDS were observed in France. In December 1982, virologists at the Institut Pasteur were contacted by clinicians who wondered if the clinical symtomas they were observing could be due to a retrovirus. They provided the Institut Pasteur team with a biopsy of lymph node from an AIDS patient and ask the researchers to isolate the etiological agent causing this mysterious disease. Indeed, the isolation of a new human retrovirus first known as LAV, lymphoadenopathy associated virus, was first reported and published in May 1983 in Science. This virus would later become the HIV, human immunodeficiency virus and would be shown as the infectious agent responsible for the AIDS disease.

Today, we have learnt that HIV infection is much more complex than initially thought and the mechanisms leading to AIDS pathogenesis are still not entirely understood. The evolution and progression of the disease caused by HIV is closely linked to a number of determinants of both the virus itself and the host. Indeed each particular path of disease progression is determined by a delicate interplay between viral and host factors. Despite all the progress in diagnosis and treatment, at the end of 2008, 33 million people currently live with HIV, 2.7 million were newly infected and a further 2 million died of AIDS. The research priorities remain to define new strategy for prevention, care and cure against HIV/AIDS.