This paper discusses how researchers promote the use of research in policy by examining the practices of 'boundary organisations' that cross the boundary between science and politics to facilitate evidence-based policies and programmes. It identifies key lessons for organisations looking to engage policymakers and decision-makers.

The study focuses on the Regional Network on AIDS, Livelihoods and Food Security (RENEWAL), a regional 'network of networks' active in Kenya, South Africa, Uganda, and Zambia which engages government officials on programmes that could inform policies on food, nutrition and HIV/AIDS. It describes the challenges and successes of efforts to promote research in these areas; challenges include adherence to scientific principles while maintaining close relationships with political authority, and ensuring accountability to the communities within which the research is conducted.

The paper offers recommendations to strengthen efforts to get research into policy, and concludes that the concept of a boundary organisation can help researchers engage people and processes that have decision-making power.

This special issue of the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Science explores how vaccines can fulfil their full potential for addressing global health challenges. It charts the progress to date, reviewing successes as well as challenges in the development and distribution of both human and veterinary vaccines.

The articles describe how vaccines can help mitigate and treat the world's major infectious diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS, as well as chronic diseases, such as cancer. They explore vaccine policy and financing, ways to accelerate the development of new vaccines, issues surrounding public acceptance, and the logistics of getting vaccines to where they are needed. Also discussed is the use of vaccines to treat diseases in livestock — making an important link between health interventions, agricultural output and economic consequences.

The papers in this issue were presented at the meeting, 'New vaccines for global health', held at the Royal Society in London, United Kingdom, in November 2010.

This report, from medical aid organisation Médecins Sans Frontières, explores the impact of and lessons learned from the use of antiretroviral treatment (ART) for HIV/AIDS since 2000, when it began providing this to people in need of urgent treatment. It presents results of a survey conducted in 16 countries with different prevalence levels of the disease, which together account for 52.5 per cent of the global HIV/AIDS burden, and outlines the progress, strengths and weaknesses of the international response to the disease.

The report provides an overview of key treatment strategies to improve care and reduce its cost for patients and health systems; discusses the impact of decreased donor funding; and suggests policies that can help lower drug costs, for example, or foster innovations for more effective and affordable treatment. Most HIV-prevalent countries still lack the capacity to treat more than 50 per cent of their population in need of ART, or to provide ART in more than 50 per cent of existing facilities — underlining the need for more domestic and external resources.

This report examines the impact of HIV/AIDS on people's livelihoods in rural areas of Africa, China, Central Asia, India and Russia.

The authors consider labour economising technologies, and set out the potential policy options. They conclude that providing anti-retroviral drugs would have an immediate, and a long-term effect on food security and is the only way of ensuring continued access to labour in the rural sector.

This report gives an overview of progress in developing an HIV/AIDS vaccine, including new adjuvant strategies, novel vectors for antigen delivery and presentation, and alternative ways of eliciting antibody responses. The authors call for continued commitment to basic research to identify an effective and affordable HIV vaccine.

This Nanomedicine paper reviews a range of strategies based on nanotechnology that are currently being used or tested to improve HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention. The authors review nanomedical advances in antiretroviral therapy, gene therapy, immunotherapy, vaccines and microbicides.

They conclude that nanotechnology promises great improvements in all of these areas but they warn that the field still faces many challenges including the toxicity of nanomaterials, their stability in physiological settings and the question of how to mass-produce them.

This series of articles considers the questions and conflicts surrounding the use of patent pools for antiretroviral (ARV) treatments for HIV/AIDS.

It provides background to the debate, considers individual proposals including the UNITAID patent pool, and offers regional perspectives on the suitability of patent pools to Africa, China and India.

This paper explains how interdisciplinary collaboration in health, nutrition, and agriculture has helped the Millennium Villages Project in 12 African villages meet the Millennium Development Goals.

Global science is increasingly under pressure to become more interdisciplinary. Econutrition is a good example of a cross-sector concept that joins environmental and human health, focusing on crosscutting areas such as agriculture and ecology.

Soil erosion and decreasing biodiversity causes environmental damage that lowers food production. A lack of food results in malnutrition and illness that, in turn, lead to poorer labour productivity and poorer agricultural management.

The Millennium Villages Project emphasises community engagement and leadership, and the case study from the Nyanza Province near Lake Victoria in Kenya illustrates that this can work well in improving nutrition.

One-fifth of adults in the area have HIV and many have malaria and TB. People in the region go hungry for up to seven months a year and are malnourished. The villagers constructed a health clinic and organised teams of community healthcare workers trained in nutrition.

Farmers receive fertilisers and plants if they donate ten per cent of their harvest towards a school lunch programme that concentrates on providing missing nutrients. For example, by adding local crops such as sweet potatoes common vitamin A deficiencies are eliminated. The key to success, say the authors, is to ensure that farmers are supported, especially in producing a variety of crops.

This article unpicks the links between nutrition and HIV/AIDS, and looks how to break the cycle between the two. Every year millions of dollars are pumped into tackling HIV/AIDS including antiretrovirals and research for vaccines and drugs. But poor nutrition remains a major barrier to preventing sickness and death from the virus.

The effects of poor nutrition on HIV status are clear: malnourishment weakens the immune system. But it also has indirect non-biological effects. For example, a lack of food can trigger dangerous coping strategies such as selling sex for food or selling assets, both of which lead to economic instability and a higher risk of HIV infection.

People with HIV are less able to absorb nutrients. And crucially, undernutrition also affects the ability of HIV-infected people to process antiretrovirals such as nevirapine.

The authors call for better targeting of food aid to HIV-infected people.

This paper, written by an international team of researchers, documents the work of the African AIDS Vaccine Programme (AAVP). It highlights the programme's impacts, successes and challenges, and looks to where the AAVP is heading.

The AAVP, supported by the WHO and UNAIDS, is a network of African HIV vaccine stakeholders that promotes a coordinated approach to developing HIV vaccines and making them available on the continent. It operates through collaborative centres located at key institutions across Africa.

Programme members work on crucial issues including regulation; ethics, laws and human rights in clinical trials; biomedical research; country-based strategic planning; and communication and media.

The authors outline the AAVP's achievements to date, highlighting its success in expanding training and infrastructure specific to HIV vaccine development. They suggest that AAVP could offer a way for African stakeholders to influence the global agenda for HIV vaccine research and development.

This paper proposes a model to provide better access to fairly priced antiretroviral (ARV) drugs for HIV-infected people in poor countries, while also safeguarding the interests of ARV manufacturers.

The authors explain what governments and brand and generic companies are doing to increase the availability of ARVs in developing countries, taking examples from Brazil, Canada, China, India, the United States and Thailand. They also discuss the implications of creating more South–South partnerships to produce and market ARVs; and the impact that the UNTAID–Clinton Foundation coalition has had on lowering ARV prices in developing countries.

The authors recommend an incentive-based strategy that includes international donors bulk-purchasing generic ARVs, individual governments providing financial relief packages for generic companies, and the WHO brokering negotiations between brand and generic companies.

This series of commentaries and research articles — published by The Lancet, the Peking University Health Sciences Centre and the China Medical Board — addresses China's major health challenges, strategies and future. It has been produced by a group of 63 scientists from 10 countries with Chinese scientists making up two-thirds of the authors.

The research papers give scientific evidence on key health issues including the emergence and control of both infectious and chronic non-infectious diseases in China as well as the performance of China's healthcare system.

Authors of the series' commentaries further discuss a range of topical issues affecting China's health system, including the state of biomedical science and technology (see 'Progress in Chinese biomedicine a massive challenge'), medical research ethics, the lessons learnt from China's schistosomiasis control programme and the challenges the country faces in controlling HIV/AIDS.

This special issue is a large collection of opinion pieces, research and review articles, and news features that highlight the advances in knowledge and challenges to the treatment and prevention of HIV/AIDS, including articles on randomised trials of promising HIV drugs.

It also includes a look at the preventive potential of microbicides and prophylactic HIV drugs. Another key issue covered is the patients' right to access to HIV treatment, and the barriers to treatment that people face if they are migrants or from socially excluded groups such as injecting drug users.

One weapon that those fighting HIV long for is an effective vaccine, and researchers outline the scientific and policy challenges of developing an HIV vaccine. The issue of paediatric HIV/AIDS cases is also discussed.

In June 2006, the UN emphasised the crucial role of food and nutrition in mitigating the effects of HIV/AIDS. This briefing paper explains how these issues are intertwined, and analyses why there has been little action in this area so far.

When food is scarce, women tend to get the smallest portion, leading them seek food elsewhere. This might include selling sex for food, putting them at a higher risk of HIV infection. Malnutrition can also weaken the immune system, making it easier to pick up infections but harder to get rid of them.

According to the report, health and food authorities each see it as the other's responsibility to integrate nutrition into HIV programmes. Donors and national policymakers have also been reluctant to support initiatives for integration. The first challenge, says the report, is raising awareness of the UN endorsement to secure action. Donors and governments should work to strengthen links between policies — the responsibility to reduce HIV/AIDS must not rest with the health sector alone. Finally, nutrition indicators should be included in clinical surveillance and reporting.

This briefing paper highlights the challenges in harmonising efforts to provide universal HIV/AIDS care. The 'Three Ones' principles, set in place to make the global fight against HIV/AIDS more efficient, advocate one action framework to coordinate all partners, one national AIDS authority and one country-level monitoring and evaluation system.

But, as the report points out, limited capacity in developing countries and a lack of incentives for donors to revise their practices are barriers to implementing these principles. There are also tensions between national ownership and accountability to donors.

By looking at countries that have been most successful in fighting the disease, such as Botswana and Malawi, the report outlines the keys to improving access to HIV/AIDS care.

Empowering national leadership is vital: what is needed are national HIV/AIDS strategies that have explicit priorities, are evidence-based, and link to other development plans. The multilateral donor community also needs to improve its delivery of technical support.

This annual update gives an overview of the latest developments in the global HIV/AIDS epidemic and provides regional statistics on the diseases's spread. It shows that numbers of people living with HIV and the number of deaths from AIDS are growing.

The report presents trends in HIV prevalence, including estimates of the number of young people and women infected in different countries. It discusses how high-risk behaviour such as unprotected sex and intravenous drug use contributes to the epidemic and how external factors such as malaria, tuberculosis, migration or political conflict affect HIV prevalence.

For this report, malaria and HIV/AIDS specialists were consulted on interactions between the two diseases and how having both affects people's health. They said there is still much to learn about the biological and clinical effects that malaria and HIV/AIDS have on each other. But some conclusions are already clear: integrating healthcare services is essential to reducing the burden of both diseases where they are prevalent. Health services providing HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment and care can serve as access points for malaria prevention and control. Likewise, new laboratory capacity to support HIV treatment and monitoring can also be used for malaria diagnosis. More research and debate is needed, however, before formulating new public health policies. 

For this report, malaria and HIV/AIDS specialists were consulted on interactions between the two diseases and how having both affects people's health. They said there is still much to learn about the biological and clinical effects that malaria and HIV/AIDS have on each other. But some conclusions are already clear: integrating healthcare services is essential to reducing the burden of both diseases where they are prevalent. Health services providing HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment and care can serve as access points for malaria prevention and control. Likewise, new laboratory capacity to support HIV treatment and monitoring can also be used for malaria diagnosis. More research and debate is needed, however, before formulating new public health policies. 

This review, although aimed primarily at a scientific audience, is a clearly written account of how HIV is believed to have evolved over the past 40 or so years since its spread to humans from apes. The authors argue for the importance of widespread monitoring of how HIV continues to change genetically, as it moves from person to person and within infected individuals, so as to help control drug resistance and design effective vaccines against HIV.

Based on data from 28 interviews among scientists, this commentary describes in clear terms how the health biotechnology industry is thriving in South Africa, nurtured by a confidence among scientists that arose originally with the development of mining and arms industry during the apartheid regime. With the emphasis on serving local needs, particularly the development of new drugs and vaccines for HIV/AIDS, South Africa is providing a shining example of how other developing countries can follow suit.