MedicineNet.com - 2nd Day HIV / AIDS Conference (CROI) February 07, 2006

Hello this is Dr. Eric Daar calling from Denver, Colorado from the 13th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections or CROI 2006. Update on meeting on second full day (February 7th). There were actually a series of world presentations all dealing with the related topic of treatment interruptions. Recently, a great deal of attention came to this area with the announcement of the data safety monitoring board closing one of these very important studies that was presented as a late breaker. The study was called SMART. It was a study through the CPCRA and the strategy was to determine whether you could take individuals with greater than 350 T cells and randomly assign them to either continue on their current therapy or interrupt their treatment with the plan of them restarting therapy if their CD4 count should drop to less than 250.