Microbicidal gel to prevent the transmission of pathogens causing sexually transmitted diseases
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Heterosexual transmissions may now account for 85% of HIV infection. As many women can not negotiate condom use with their partners, there is an urgent need to develop barrier methods where women could protect themselves against HIV and other sexually transmitted pathogens. We have developed a thermoreversible gel formulation (the Invisible Condom™) that could be applied to the vaginal, cervical or ano-rectal mucosae and which could be effective in preventing STDs. Our gel formulation was shown to be non-toxic and effective in blocking HIV and HSV transmission. To achieve efficient blocking, inhibition and/or killing of pathogens, we have incorporated sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS), a surfactant that denatures membrane proteins of many pathogens, into the gel. Incubation of various HSV strains with SLS decreased, in a concentration-dependent manner, their infectivities to Vero cells. SLS was also a potent inhibitor of HIV infectivity to 1G5 cells. In addition, electron microscopic examination of HSV-infected cells showed capsid shells devoid of DNA core in the nuclei. The efficacy of the gel containing SLS to prevent intravaginal HSV-2 infection has been evaluated in a murine model. All mice pretreated with the gel formulation either at 5 or 30min prior to infection survived to lethality associated with infection. When the gel was applied 1h before infection, still 80% of animals survived the infection. Furthermore, HSV titration in vaginal mucosa of infected mice revealed no presence of virus in animals pretreated with the gel containing SLS as compared to control infected mice. Finally, the gel containing SLS, did not induce ulceration or necrosis to the vaginal and cervical mucosae of rabbits after daily intravaginal application for two weeks. Taken together, these results indicate that the thermoreversible gel containing SLS as a microbicide could represent an innovative preventive measure to reduce the sexual transmission of HIV, herpes and possibly other sexually transmitted pathogens.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".