We would like to update you about a number of new developments at the IAVI Report. Four and half years ago, IAVI published the first issue of the IAVI Report. Released at the 11th International Conference on AIDS in Vancouver, the publication set out to report on the emerging field of AIDS vaccine research throughout the world.
Over the past few years, the mounting evidence that protection against HIV will require cellular immune responses (as well as antibodies) has fueled the development of vaccine candidates aimed at stimulating this arm of the immune system.
Davos – In a challenge to the world to move faster in developing an AIDS vaccine, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has announced an unprecedented US$ 100 million in support of IAVI's $550 million funding target, bringing the amount of secured commitments to $230 million – over 40% of the total. The pledge is intended to spur mobilization of additional global support towards reaching this funding goal.
Nairobi — On 25 January 2001 the Kenyan Government endorsed plans for a Phase I trial of an HIV-DNA vaccine based on subtype A, the predominant strain in East Africa.
Abuja — From 15-17 January 2001, over 100 scientists, policy makers and representatives from multilateral organizations gathered in Nigeria's capital city for a "Consensus Building Workshop Towards the Development of a Nigerian National HIV Vaccine Strategy."
Jaap Goudsmit has worked in the AIDS field since the epidemic's early days, when he and several colleagues began studying progression to full-blown AIDS in cohorts of gay men and intravenous drug users — now the longest-standing HIV cohorts in the world.
As a growing number of HIV vaccine candidates enter the development pipeline, more attention is going to the mammoth task of planning and preparing for the large clinical trials down the road — the Phase III efficacy studies that test whether an experimental vaccine actually protects people against AIDS.
A short drive from the modern metropolis of Johannesburg lies the sprawling, bustling, impoverished township of Soweto, best known to outsiders as the site of fervent anti-apartheid activism in the 1970s.
James Ludigo stands in front of a crowded room in a spare, concrete-walled church in a rural village in the Rakai district of southwestern Uganda. He wears a baseball cap and T-shirt from his employer, the Rakai Project.
It's easy to see why Carletonville has become an epicenter for South Africa's AIDS crisis. Every day, some 70,000 migrant miners work grueling shifts in the largest gold-mining complex in the world.
HIV vaccine advocates, like other interest groups, witnessed the US Presidential inauguration in January 2001 without a clear sense of where the new president may be headed. Following a truncated transition and a campaign in which AIDS issues did not figure prominently, observers were left to discern hints from the political tea leaves.
Every year the Institute for Human Virology (IHV) hosts a six-day science marathon that, in deference to IHV's well-known director, many people refer to simply as "The Gallo Meeting." The 2000 event packed in nearly 300 presentations on diverse topics, including about 30 relating to HIV vaccines.
The apparent contradictions among the results obtained by the Ensoli, Pauza and Shiver studies (see main article) continue to be a source of some controversy in the vaccine research community. Shortly after the Gallo meeting, Shiver's data showing a lack of protection with Merck's Tat protein vaccine....
Few monkey studies have attracted more attention than one recently published in Science (20 October 2000; see also article on p.1). Conducted by Harvard researchers and funded by the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the study showed that monkeys immunized with a DNA vaccine
Efforts to advance two IAVI-sponsored candidate HIV vaccines received a major boost with the announcement that clinical trials of one vaccine have begun, and a second one has received regulatory approval to start.
Even before the 12,700 delegates at this summer's XIII International Conference on AIDS had left for home, the meeting was already being hailed as a landmark event in the history of the epidemic.
The ethics of clinical research in developing regions was the official topic of just four sessions at the Durban meeting. Yet the questions addressed there pervaded many other issues discussed at the conference, and are sure to come to the forefront as clinical studies of AIDS vaccines, microbicides and treatments move ahead internationally.
Eight sites in Africa, Asia, South America and the Caribbean will join nine U.S. centers in the new HIV Vaccine Trials Network (HVTN), according to an announcement in Durban by the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
Marc Girard has been in the AIDS vaccine research field since the mid-1980s, working first on chimpanzees and then on macaques as model systems for vaccine testing. Girard headed the French research agency's HIV Vaccine Task Force from 1988-1998 and recently finished a three-year stint on IAVI's Scientific Advisory Committee.
A newcomer to the AIDS vaccine meeting scene, the "First International Conference on Vaccine Development and Immunotherapy" was held in Palm Beach, Florida from 28 June - 1 July. Sponsored by the International Medical Press and IAVI, it attracted about 150 researchers. Much of the focus was on vaccine design and testing, including novel vectors and macaques studies, and on immune evasion and correlates of protection.
In Summer 2000, IAVI's Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC) was reorganized so it can better guide the organization's research and development program, which has grown considerably since IAVI's founding in 1996.
SmithKline Bio Aiming For Phase III Vaccine Trials in Three Years; SmithKline Herpes Vaccine May Work in Women Only; Targeted Genetics Announces New Deals; AlphaVax Gets New Financing; ProdiGene to develop plant-based HIV vaccine; Four Companies Get NIAID Team Grants
On 30-31 May 2000, IAVI held a workshop in New York to discuss prospects for establishing large-scale HIV vaccine trial sites in developing countries. Participants were drawn from various government agencies and from African nations not already committed to specific vaccine projects or partnerships but potentially interested in becoming involved.
This information is designed to support, not replace, the relationship that exists between you and your doctor.