Guido Silvestri and Mirko Paiardini, very Italian, are among the top experts in the world of AIDS. They have a long and prestigious career behind them, made up of discoveries and goals. It is therefore not surprising that the United States Healthcare has chosen to bet on them for his ambitious goal: defeat AIDS five years from now.
Who are Guido Silvestri and Mirko Paiardini
Guido Silvestri has been working on the fight against AIDS for over thirty years. He leads the Vaccine Center's microbiology and immunology team Emory University in Atlanta, and is a pathologist, immunologist, virologist, scientific popularizer and academic from Perugia born in 1962. He studied in Ancona, in Florence and in Philadelphia. He moved to Montreal on a research project and - in 2001 - began running an AIDS science research laboratory at Emory University. Since 2018 he has chaired the scientific council of the French government agency that coordinates research on AIDS, hepatitis and emerging viral diseases. He has discovered and characterized the mechanisms by which primate lentiviruses, and therefore the viruses to which HIV belongs, are not pathogenic in their natural hosts as are circocebes.
Mirko Paiardini, who graduated from Urbino, AIDS has been trying to defeat him for two decades. He too, on request at Emory University in Atlanta, has been working with Guido Silvestri for some time. And, together with him and an all-Italian research team, he managed to demonstrate how some types of anticancer drugs make it possible to eliminate certain cells in which HIV is hiding. "We have shown that some anticancer drugs eliminate an important part of the virus hidden in the reservoir cells, but in itself we cannot yet speak of a cure: it is good to underline this in order not to feed false hopes."He told only last year.
The choice of US healthcare
Why did American health care choose Guido Silvestri and Mirko Paiardini? Because it is decided to defeat AIDS, not just to keep it at bay. To do this, it has allocated hundreds of millions of dollars by marrying the research projects of several scientists. Including, precisely, Silvestri and Paiardini. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), the American federal body for medical research, has decided to finance ten university and research center projects. With one goal: to overcome today's treatments, based on very expensive drug cocktails and with non-negligible side effects. Medicines chronic the disease, but cannot eliminate it. Those who contract the virus remain positive, and AIDS "reappears" when they stop retroviral drugs.
Silvestri is at the helm of four of the ten projects funded by the NIH, while Paiardini is directing a fifth project. Which sees the participation of the Italian colleague, and has obtained 29 million dollars. "In the past we looked for HIV mainly in the blood but now, with our project and the work on monkeys, we are able to look for it everywhere: in the tissues, in the lymph nodes, in the intestine, in the brain. Once we discover his refuge, we can eliminate him with the immunomodulatory techniques designed in these years of research”Explained Paiardini.
