Queen’s University bioscientist Donald Forsdyke is available to comment on World AIDS Day (Dec. 1) and a release by the World Health Organization proclaiming “unparalleled global progress in HIV response” and calls for sustained investment over the long term.

“Progress yes, but unparalleled implies a control Earth with which we can compare,” says Dr. Forsdyke. “Perhaps AIDS would no longer be a problem if other approaches had been tried.”

Dr. Forsdyke was one of the 20 successful applicants (and the only non-US researcher) to be funded in AMFAR's (American Foundation for AIDS Research) first competition for funding in the 1980s. He discovered an agent (known as a chemokine; CCL3) that was subsequently found to bind to a lymphocyte surface component that is a coreceptor for the AIDS virus (needed for the virus to enter cells).

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