The HPTN 052 results were headline news at IAS 2011. Principal Investigator Myron Cohen, MD, talked with the IAS about the years of work that went into the trial, the research team’s emotions upon first learning the results, and the weeks that followed. Dr. Cohen is Associate Vice Chancellor for Global Health and Director of the Institute for Global Health & Infectious Diseases at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

By Scott Sanders

As Myron Cohen and his colleagues finished presenting the results of the HPTN 052 trial to a packed room at IAS 2011, the audience rose to its feet in a standing ovation. It was a rare occurrence at a scientific meeting, reflecting the significance of the results and the tremendous efforts behind them.

The emotions of Cohen and his team members that July afternoon in Rome were a far cry from those they had felt less than three months before. Heading back to the Washington, DC, airport after a regularly scheduled meeting with the study’s Data and Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB) on 28 April 2011, the researchers feared the study might be about to come to an end. The research team was completely blinded to the study results data and some of the unusual actions of the DSMB members in the meeting that day had them fearing the worst. More...

Since 2009 I've been working as web content editor for the Science and Technology Park in Sardinia. In 2010 I started to work as media representative for a biopharma company called ViroStatics, which tests and designs new drugs against HIV. In the field of research there is a growing demand for communication professionals able to translate scientific results and data to the general public, especially through new media and social networking tools.

(Also) Nowadays, both private and public funding institutions require visibility and dissemination of the scientific results achieved. This is why researchers specialize more and more on scientific communication and journalists and editors are trying to improve their expertise on science. Not only developing research is important, but also translating research findings from scientific language into a language that is easier to understand for the general public. More...