Cicle de conferències 2014-2015. Lecture.The Microbiome in HIV Infection

Abstract

HIV / AIDS infection is a major health problem with more than 30 million people affected worldwide and more than 2 million new infections each year. Fortunately, antiretroviral treatments manage to reduce mortality and improve patient’s quality of life. However, even for those patients with better infection control, chronic inflammation is present and this prevents the disease from being cured and triggers major diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease and some cancers. Understanding the impact of the gut microbiome in this chronic inflammation could help many people, not just HIV infected patients. In this lecture we will explain how IrsiCaixa and Uvic-UCC have joined forces on defining the role of gut microbiome on the pathogenesis of HIV / AIDS infection and how this exciting but challenging research requires an approach from different disciplines: medicine, bioinformatics and biostatistics. We will present some of the first interesting findings from this project.