News

At the PSC Partners Seeking a Cure 2017 Annual Conference, PSC Partners interviewed several experts, which including the Forum's Executive Director, Veronica Miller, PhD. In this interview, Dr. Miller discusses her background as a clinical researcher, virologist and immunologist and highlights the importance of the PSC Forum. She states,"the aim of the project is to bring all of the different scientists together, from all the different stakeholders to come to a consensus on what it takes to develop new diagnostics and drugs and establish enough collaboration to make the whole system more efficient." PSC is the Forum's most recent project.

For more information on PSC Partners Seeking a Cure and to learn more about primary sclerosing cholangitis, please visit their website below:

http://pscpartners.org/awareness-week/

A message from Christopher Leptak at the Food and Drug Administration, Office of New Drugs

Under the 21st Century Cures Act enacted on December 13, 2016, new section 507 (“Qualification of Drug Development Tools”) was added to the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FD&C Act). Although CDER had previously implemented a biomarker qualification program (or “legacy” program), section 507 establishes an updated, multi-stage process for DDT qualification.

Washington D.C., June 19, 2017- The Forum for Collaborative Research is launching the PSC Forum to advance the regulatory science for the development of therapeutics for PSC and its associated morbidities.

The Forum for Collaborative Research
formerly
The Forum for Collaborative HIV Research

We, the Forum for Collaborative Research, affiliated with the University of California Berkeley School of Public Health, are celebrating our twentieth anniversary this year. This milestone comes with changes as a result of the Forum’s achievements, and recommendations from our Executive Committee members. For the past two decades, the Forum’s work with HIV has evolved into a disease-specific model for multi-stakeholder collaboration that now addresses other disease areas including liver diseases (non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, non-alcoholic steatohepatitis, and primary sclerosing cholangitis), viral hepatitis (B and C), cytomegalovirus, among others. Thus, the Forum for Collaborative Research will now be comprised of different disease-specific Forums including:

• The CMV Forum
• The HBV Forum
• The HCV Forum
• The HIV Forum
• The Liver Forum

A Press Release from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

U.S. Could Be Rid of Hepatitis B and C as Public Health Problems, Preventing Nearly 90,000 Deaths by 2030, With Better Attention to Prevention, Screening, Treatment, and Creative Financing for Medicines

WASHINGTON – Hepatitis B and C kill more than 20,000 people every year in the United States.  A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine presents a strategy to eliminate these diseases as serious public health problems and prevent nearly 90,000 deaths by 2030.

“Viral hepatitis is simply not a sufficient priority in the United States,” said Brian Strom, chair of the committee that carried out the study and chancellor and university professor, Rutgers Biomedical and Sciences, Rutgers University, Newark, N.J.  “Despite being the seventh leading cause of death in the world – and killing more people every year than HIV, road traffic accidents, or diabetes – viral hepatitis accounts for less than 1 percent of the National Institutes of Health research budget.”

A message from IAS (International AIDS Society).

Dear IAS Members and Partners 

As 2017 begins, our community is anxious and concerned. Political and societal changes continue to upend our expectations and generate uncertainty about what is ahead of us. We worry about human rights, the plight of refugees and migrants, progress towards gender equality, and the strength of our commitment to each other as human beings.

Deeply wrapped up in all of this is our fight against HIV – a disease that has shown itself adept at exploiting the very changes that seem to be dominating our world. 

As corners of the planet shift towards nationalism and xenophobia, we wonder where the future of our global cause lies. Is the progress we have made against the greatest pandemic of our time slipping through our hands?

A new initiative is under way to strengthen community leadership and mobilization toward ambitious HIV prevention and treatment goals against the backdrop of anticipated shifts in federal support and resources for critical programs.
 
NEW YORK, NY, January 30, 2017—Treatment Action Group (TAG) is pleased to announce the expansion of its Ending the Epidemic campaign to foster the development of bold epidemic-ending initiatives in some of the most heavily impacted regions of the United States. In close collaboration with its national and regional partners, TAG aims to strengthen partnerships in three southern states to substantially reduce HIV incidence and maximize health outcomes, and to support the community mobilization efforts required to foster the federal and regional political support necessary to meet established goals.

A message from Dean Stefano Bertozzi and the UC Berkeley School of Public Health.

Are you or someone you know looking to expand your skills or brush up on a certain area of public health? The School of Public Health On-Campus/Online MPH degree program—the first online professional degree program offered at UC Berkeley—has been very successful to date and we’ve recently added a track in Health Policy and Management. Now, we are taking our online education further by offering more degree concentrations and introducing single course and certificate enrollment options.

In the coming months we will be introducing new Public Health Certificates to complement our already popular online MPH degree. These certificates—composed of 3 or 4 specialized courses—will focus on specific areas such as Global Health, Geographic Information Systems, Health Management, Leadership and Innovation, and Epidemiology and Biostatistics.

Starting in January 2017, we are introducing single courses available for immediate enrollment, with a few more courses starting in March 2017. We appreciate your support in spreading the word about these online courses. If you or someone you know might be interested, please see below to get started.

The Singapore Hepatitis Conference was convened on 27-28 May 2016 in Singapore. With more than 400 participants representing 26 countries, the meeting successfully created awareness, provided updates, and shared new developments in the clinical management of HBV and HCV.

A message from the NIH National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

The NIAID has posted a video describing the development of HIV vaccine candidates and the launch of the NIAID-supported HVTN 702 clinical trial, the first new HIV vaccine efficacy study in seven years. HVTN 702 is testing whether an experimental vaccine regimen safely prevents HIV infection among South African adults. The regimen involves a new version of the only HIV vaccine candidate ever shown to provide some protection against the virus.