AIDS treatment in an out of gender

A dendritic cell

PART ONE

Although the decrease is not sufficient, the first therapeutic AIDS vaccine, designed from the dendritic cells of the actual patients by the Hospital Clinic of Barcelona-IDIBAPS in the framework of the HIVACAT, the Catalan programme for the development of therapeutic vaccines and prevention against the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), has achieved a significant response in the majority of patients.

The trial I results of the study (three more will come), which counted on an international collaboration with teams from France, the Hôpital Pitié-Salpêtriére and the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris/INSERM,  and the USA, the National Institute of Cancer in Maryland, have been just published in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases.

The final aim of the therapeutic vaccine is to minimize the use and to avoid a life long treatment with antiretroviral drugs that, because of their expensive and a life long administration, bring about a great economic burden. Besides, there is no experience over the long term and it is not known if the treatments could bring about resistance, which they happen to do if not well taken, while some of them have proved to bring about side effects (for instance cardiovascular diseases.

“AIDS is unique among the infectious diseases since it is the only one that we cannot cure in spite of having very good drugs”, says Teresa Gallart, immunologist at the Hospital Clinic and one of the 17 authors of the study (9 women and 8 men).

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Time of wool

A special waste deposited in a special bank. A couple of musicians and building products distributors, Daniela and Oscar, worried about the future they were leaving to their kids.

The importance of exchanging knowledge and help they could see by only looking outside their house window and seeing the building rows grounded thanks to  “s’aggiudu torrau” (the returned favour), an ancient practice still well working in Sardinia.  All of this in a town in the south of the island, Guspini, where sheep quintuple inhabitants and where time, the soundtrack of this story, flows with no hurry.

When, more than 10 years ago, Daniela Ducato first heard of the Bank of Time she thought it was the most suitable project for the 12,000 inhabitants community where she had moved following her husband, Oscar, who she met at the conservatory, where they both studied.  “Le città invisibili” (the invisible towns), an entity through which people of every age deposit their time and knowledge and receive the same invaluable coin in return, soon became one of the first Banks of Time running in Italy (today there exist 132), allowing among others the changeover of 22 degraded areas into “feeling gardens”. It’s in the bank where Tonina, a neighbour client, one day deposited quintals of wool saying she was tired of spending a lot of money to burn it –it’s considered a special waste- but didn’t know how to use it.

“Engineous” encounters

Control sensors that know every house’s real energy expenses, high security systems, home cinema, wireless band width communications inside the houses, led usage in new contexts such as streets and car headlights and software solutions for the reconstruction of faces from bone remains.

These are only some of the examples of what can be achieved from getting together professionals coming from all the different areas of telecommunication technologies and computing focusing on domotics engineering, optical engineering and virtual reality applications with the aim to facilitate the life of building users, optimize energy consumption and offer new services through the exploitation of virtual reality.

This is what they do at CeDInt, the R&D centre of the Universidad Politécnica of Madrid of Madrid directed since its beginning, in 2004, by telecommunications engineer Asunción Santamaría.

Your view

“Whenever I tell how I started working in Twision no one believes it”, Marta Simonet says.

Theatre actress, TV presenter, blogger, model, since last March, when it began airing, she’s also one of the three hosts of Twision, the first world-wide Twitter television initiative originated from a digital TV channel in Spain, Veo7, a part of Unidad Editorial. Already this year Twision was one of this year’s most innovative formats at the MIP TV in Cannes.

“It happened by chance”, she explains. “While surfing in twitter I found out there was a show of this kind airing in my own country, so I sent a message to the channel’s director, Melchor Miralles, saying I found it fascinating and that I was there for whatever was needed. He called me inviting my as a guest, made me a good offer and I accepted it right away”.