San Francisco Chronicle - September 25, 2009
Tom Abate, Chronicle Staff Writer

"This definitely would not have happened without Don Francis," said Marcus Conant, an emeritus professor at UCSF and longtime AIDS physician. "He pursued the concept of an AIDS vaccine when almost everyone else said it couldn't be done."

Francis, 67, is a co-founder of Global Solutions for Infectious Diseases, the South San Francisco nonprofit that contributed half of the double-acting vaccine that proved 31 percent effective in preventing AIDS infections in a 16,000-person clinical trial in Thailand.

"I'm not sure if I'm elated, but I'm pleased," Francis said Thursday. "We're on the second step of the ladder now, when all these years we've been falling off the first step."

Francis started fighting AIDS in the early 1980s as a maverick scientist with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in San Francisco who argued that unprotected sex at gay bath houses and tainted blood transfusions were spreading the disease - exploits dramatized by actor Matthew Modine in "And the Band Played On," the HBO movie based on the book of the same name by the late Chronicle writer Randy Shilts.

In 1993, Francis left the CDC to join the biotech firm Genentech, which developed an experimental AIDS vaccine that is the ancestor of the formulation used in the Thai test.

Tim Mastro, former head of the CDC's HIV vaccine unit, said Francis tried to persuade the National Institutes of Health to fund clinical trials of the vaccine, and when it said no, he helped spin off the technology into the startup VaxGen, to raise private funds for the tests.

"Don has a really unique blend of scientific rigor, charisma and vision," said Mastro, now with Family Health International in North Carolina.

As president of VaxGen from 1996 to 2004, Francis helped raise about $200 million and oversaw clinical trials of the AIDS vaccine in North America and Thailand. But when the results were analyzed in 2003, that first Thai trial was a complete flop and the North American study was a failure, though it did show hints that the vaccine might benefit African Americans but not whites.

"It was a difficult time," said Francis, who joined other VaxGen veterans to co-found the nonprofit Global Solutions in 2004 to carry on the AIDS vaccine work.

The new and partially successful Thai trial, sponsored by the U.S. Army and the National Institutes for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, combined the Global Solutions vaccine with a different formulation created by the French firm Sanofi Pasteur.

Francis said the two vaccines, acting in different ways, produced results neither could show alone and showed that persistence despite failure could lead to success.

"I've had scientific successes and scientific failures," he said. "I'm looking at tomorrow instead of yesterday."

E-mail Tom Abate at tabate@sfchronicle.com.

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