Name: Brainstorm Health: How HIV Research Changed Health Care
Uploaded: 2017-05-03
Duration: 6 min 2 s
Description: Drs. Larry Corey and Diane Havlir, two physicians specializing in HIV, discuss how the virus has changed health care over the years.

[ MUSIC ] One thing we know about infectious disease is be at the flu or Ebola or HIV, they don't go away on their own. When you are fighting them you have to fight nonstop. And you can't fight for four years and then drop it because your funding disappears. So one thing that I think about a lot and it comes up a lot in these types of conversations you know is the threats to a persistent HIV response. We've made all this progress, what is it going to take casting forward to make sure that your trials get finished and that the follow up work gets funded. Well, you know for sure HIV is the epidemic of our time. You know we still have one point four million infections globally, we still have in our country 45 thousand infections globally and i think to some extent the health care of our generation is going to be defined by how we handle this epidemic. How we're starting to get 25 million people on therapy and some of the issues is will be provide the technologies to actually prevent the acquisition of these and actually even get close to. To me what I define as a needs for new generation which is from the United States would be less than a thousand cases a year and for the world to be less than a hundred thousand cases a year. Which is essentially a 90 % reduction in where we are now. Now I don't think is gonna happen unless we have a vaccine or unless we have a long- acting biological. That the issue of taking a pill every day for a disease, to prevent a disease, is really something that is fraught with compliance issues. And I think you can take a country like South Africa, which has the largest HIV treatment program on the world, and it now has 8 or 9 million people on treatment. But the incidence of the epidemic, especially among women, has not been dented at all in five years. Now, they've changed life expectancy incredibly. So, I really do believe that, we are gonna be defined by our ability to actually develop a technology that allows people to prevent this infection, and I, sort of, feel that way, as it relates to all, essentially, all epidemic diseases. I mean, HIV, our platform has Has lead the way so that we can develop Zika vaccines and Ebola vaccines. The DNA, the NBA, the whole vector platforms which these vaccines, the Zika and Ebola, which have worked and are very likely to work so it's not gonna be a hard virus to make a vaccine for. All were tested through the HIV vaccine program. All came into this through that way. So. I do belive that technology is critical we need to use it and i think that we the society will be defined on how we bring this technology to improve the health [ UNKNOWN ] .>> What would be required to pull that off? because one can say, you know we have the technology to create a Zika vaccine but we don't have one yet .>> Commitment I did a program with vice and not that I certainly, I didn't vote for George W Bush but he did do [ UNKNOWN ] and he looked at the issue of the funding and he said now's not the time to take the foot off of the gas. You know, we've made an enormous amount of progress in this program, both in the therapy point of view and the prevention point of view. And we need sustained commitment, and I think it's gonna require public- private partnerships. We love to think we can do things in academia, but we can't manufacture a damn thing. [ LAUGH ] And what companies do is they democratize therapies. And we need that expertise from companies. Yes we recognize that we are in high risk business and it's the public that's gonna gain the most. And so public funding and philanthropic funding is actually needed for this kind of diseases. But we must engage industry. We must engage the latest in technologies and We gotta develop disruptive technologies to deliver antibodies. If it's the antibody approach so we can make it at $ 5 a gram not $ 100 a gram. And I actually think that'll disrupt the The antibody productions for the diseases that are costing a huge amount of money for the anti- cancer antibodies. And other things when you come up with manufacturing techniques that really allow to cut the cost of this by tenfold. Do you have anything? Maybe just three things. Invest in research. Invest in cure. We know things work. As we say, either we pay now or we pay later, because New infections are driving the epidemic. And then the third thing, which we've really learned is talk to the community. We can end the AIDS epidemic but the community's gonna need to want to. And all this, people can't take therapy for years and years. Yes, they can. In this place we're working, we've achieved, we've exceeded. 90 % of the people know they're infected. Over 90 % are taking meds. And 90 % Have been taking them from bureaus and suppress their virus. But it's because they wanted to do it, and one of the things they told us how, one of the big challenges than HIV nearly half the people in the planet don't even know they have it. But the communities we work was said, don't just do HIV testing, tell us if we have diabetes, tell us if we have high blood pressure we're like, we can do that. That's no problem. So we have to I think listen a little bit more when we tackle these big problems. Yeah, the African communities, they are social communities and its a social group, there is much more groupness in decision making and in how they live than our highly individualistic society. I think HIV is also helped the healthcare system, I mean tier pricing exists because of HIV, what the Clinton Foundation, what everybody did with respect to bringing drugs to the developing world, that whole model is there. I wished the cancer business actually followed that model.

Brainstorm Health: How HIV Research Changed Health Care

Drs. Larry Corey and Diane Havlir, two physicians specializing in HIV, discuss how the virus has changed health care over the years.