Department of Medicine paper voted one of the top 10 HIV papers of 2009-2010 by the British HIV Association

Head of Section of Infectious Diseases, Professor Myra McClure's paper, 'Delayed anti-HCV antibody response in HIV-positive men acutely infected with HCV' was voted one of the top ten HIV papers of the year 2009-2010

 Head of Section of Infectious Diseases, Professor Myra McClure's paper, 'Delayed anti-HCV antibody response in HIV-positive men acutely infected with HCV' was voted one of the top ten HIV papers of the year 2009-2010 by the British HIV Association.

This paper was a by-product of a multi-centre randomised controlled clinical trial of two arms of short-course combination antiretroviral therapy at primary HIV infection, compared to no therapy. The international trial, funded by the Wellcome Trust since 2004 and known as SPARTAC (for Short Pulse Anti-Retroviral Therapy at sero-Conversion) was the brainchild of Professor Jonathan Weber who, along with Dr Sarah Fidler, masterminded patient recruitment and long-term clinical follow-up across 4 continents.  For the 157 patients recruited in the UK, patients were regularly monitored in the Clinical Trials Centre at St Mary's by the SPARTAC physician, Dr Emma Thomson and blood samples collected at regular intervals for virus characterisation and humoral immunity by Professor Myra McClure's group and aliquots sent to Professor Rodney Phillips in Oxford to measure cellular immunity.

Thus, when a proportion of the recruits became infected with HCV, we were in a position to go back to archived tissue and determine by both  PCR and by serology a reasonably accurate seroconversion date and to demonstrate that RT-PCR detected HCV infection much earlier than serology.  Preliminary data generated on this HIV/HCV infected cohort constituted the basis on which the Wellcome Trust further funded a Clinical Training Fellowship to investigate  HCV sequence variation in this cohort and evaluate T cell responses. 

The full reference to the paper is as follows: Thomson EC, Nastouli E, Main J, Karayiannis P, Eliahoo J, Muir D, McClure MO., 'Delayed anti-HCV antibody response in HIV-positive men acutely infected with HCV', AIDS. 2009 Jan 2;23(1):89-93.