On April 9, Professor Sharon Lewin will be speaking at Women in Science – Inspiring Tomorrow’s Leaders in Melbourne. In the lead up to the event, she writes for Mamamia about her work researching HIV and AIDS.
By Professor Sharon Lewin
With the discovery of effective treatment in 1996, HIV was transformed from a death sentence to a manageable chronic disease. But treatment must be lifelong, is not available to all who need it, and there is no cure.
This July, Melbourne will be hosting the 20th International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2014) and I will be the local co-chair for the conference. I will be sharing this role with Francoise Barré-Sinoussi, who discovered the HIV virus in 1983 and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2010. It will be the first time that two women and two laboratory scientists have chaired the conference—both a recognition of the important role that women and science have played in shaping the global response to HIV so far, as well as the leadership that we will continue to show in the future.
Women continue to be important in every aspect of the response to HIV – not only in the laboratory but also in households, families, communities, clinics and political leadership around the world.
I started work on finding a cure for HIV as a young doctor working for Dr David Ho in New York in the late 1990s. David Ho was Time Man of the Year in 1996 for discovering the lifesaving antiviral treatment that people with HIV enjoy today. At the time, we thought that antiviral treatment alone was going to cure HIV – but we were rapidly proved wrong. We learnt that HIV can “hide” from current treatments by infecting certain long lived cells and if we were ever to cure HIV, we would need to know how HIV got into its hiding place and how to lure it out of there. Once back in Melbourne in 1999, I set up a new laboratory to set to work on answering these questions. Over the last 15 years, we have made some very significant progress – but we still have no cure.