In a move that has stunned HIV experts, German scientists reported yesterday that they had engineered an enzyme that attacked the DNA of the HIV virus, and cut it out of the infected cell.

James Dodd of Hanford, who once weighed 444 pounds, had weight-reduction surgery in Mexico after his insurance company refused to fund it. He says medical care in Mexico, if researched well, is equivalent to care in the U.S. at a fraction of the cost.

A new, non-surgical procedure called radio-frequency ablation (RFA) offers new hope for patients with inoperable kidney and liver tumors. RFA uses heat to “vaporize”

Patients infected with both hepatitis B and HIV should not take the hepatitis-fighting drug Baraclude on its own, new research confirms.

GenVec, Inc. (Nasdaq: GNVC), announced today that the Vaccine Research Center (VRC) of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has begun a Phase I clinical trial to test a novel vaccine known as Ad35HIV-EnvA to prevent HIV-1 infection.

amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research, will grant almost $1.2 million for 10 new research projects aimed at increasing understanding of the social and biological factors that influence the treatment of HIV/AIDS, Dr. Rowena Johnston, amfAR’s vice president of research.

Researchers have known that some primates, such as macaques, can fight off HIV with an antiviral protein called TRIM5-alpha, whereas the human version, though only slightly different, cannot combat HIV.