Today - GcMAF poster exhibition, #THPE0051, best from 12:30

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July 22, 2010Today - GcMAF poster exhibition, #THPE0051, best from 12:30 - 14:30
by John S. James


Why It Matters

Here is an HIV-eradication research direction ignored by the AIDS research mainstream, though many peer-reviewed papers have been published -- one claiming HIV eradication in patients in clinical trials in ***. Not only Drs. N. Yamamoto and others, whose work will be presented today at the International AIDS Conference, but also other research teams have worked with this substance (usually in cancer not HIV); there is agreement that it does have anti-cancer activities at least in mice, and should be a basis for drug development (for example, to find a small molecule that mimics its effects).

GcMAF also got into the cancer-treatment underground, which may be why few scientists have paid attention to it.

At today's poster, the presenting author is listed as Dr. Marco Ruggiero, a molecular biologist who has not published on GcMAF before. We do not know if Dr. Yamamoto (who is the senior author of the poster) will be there.

If GcMAF eradicates HIV in patients as Dr. Yamamoto describes, this poster could be the most important presentation at the Vienna conference.

Do we think it's a cure? No, because most treatments fail. But it could possibly be a major advance, so it should get attention. Today is the best time for scientists around the world to get a look.

A recent press report quoted Dr. Dieffenbacher, director of the AIDS Division at US NIAID, as saying "there is really a dearth of new approaches" for HIV eradication. Could this be a garden-variety case of group dynamics, where insiders talk to each other and keep narrowing their focus, not seeing anything of interest outside the narrow spotlight beam, and becoming increasingly irrelevant? Big advances often come from outside.


Background Info

Today's (Thursday's) poster is # THPE0051, titled "Gc protein-derived macrophage activating factor (GcMAF) stimulates activation and proliferation of human circulating monocytes," by M. Ruggiero, S. Pacini, and N. Yamamoto. It is in the poster exhibition. The presenter is usually there from 12:30-14:30.

Dr. Yamamoto's most recent paper, which reports HIV eradication in people, is Immunotherapy of HIV-Infected Patients With Gc Protein-Derived Macrophage Activating Factor (GcMAF) (Journal of Medical Virology, January 2009).

Also search PubMed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/) for GcMAF. The substance has different names, so also try DPB-MAF. Or search for "vitamin D binding protein" -- which is a precursor of GcMAF.

And for any of those searches you can look at Related Citations -- e.g. the 132 citations related to the search result for GcMAF.