Name: The Future of HIV Vaccine Development
Uploaded: 2017-05-03
Duration: 5 min 52 s
Description: Experts are “cautiously optimistic.”

It's very easy to forget that in the US, HIV was a disease with a death sentence. Fairly recently, HIV was a disease with a death sentence. Today just 39, 000, roughly 39, 000, 49, 000, people are diagnosed with HIV in the United States every year, but there are 1. 2 million people living. Largely helpfully with the disease. So there's a lot of progress to be made but there's a lot of work left to be done as well. Dr Hadler you worked on one of the first AID's ward's in the United States or the first AID's wards in the United States and you eventually launched Getting to Zero in San Francisco which is an incredible program with incredible results. So can you tell the room a little more about that We're gonna start with the successes. Okay, sure. Well as mentioned, where we'd been in HIV we didn't know what caused it, we didn't know how to treat it, we didn't know how to prevent it. And now we know all three of those things. And we've gone from a very grim time to a very optimistic time. And really my mission is my goal, I love to talk about goals, is really to end the AIDS epidemic. And one of the ways we can start doing that by is by finding everyone who's infected, offering them treatment, and people who are at risk also offering preventative treatment, which you heard a little bit about this new exciting technology. But still right now we have the pill. So a couple of years ago we were having a panel just like this only it would have been HIV Health in San Francisco at the LGBT Center. We brought all these cool things, self testing, and we were talking. And I wanna emphasize this point of how we launched our getting to zero initiative. Somebody was sitting in the front row, someone living with HIV in San Francisco, and raised his hand and said this is cool but are you guys all working together? And what we realize we were not working together enough as we should have. And from that point was we launched an initiative with the politicians, the private sector, the academicians, the people living with HIV, and the government officials. And we used the principle of collective impact and we said we need together all doing what we're supposed to do in order to Reduced the number of HIV infections in San Fransisco so that's what we're doing now. We're starting to see reductions in HIV infections and we have a three pound approach, which I'm happy to talk about. But it all started from looking at the disease. From the patient's perspective. Right, talking about real humans. And we will talk a little bit more detail about what it is you've done, and how it can possibly scale elsewhere. One way obviously to limit the spread of HIV is through programs like this, that literally limit the spread from one person to another. There's another way to attack the HIV virus, which is to try to come up with A vaccine that prevents the transmission in the first place. And Dr. Corey you've been at the front lines for a long time as well working on drug development and even vaccines and you've said that for all the progress we've made we can't treat our way out of this epidemic, so how far are we from vaccine? Well, cautiously optimistic, I think we are at a wonderful, Sort of, I'll call it the Yogi Bear moment, in HIV vaccine development. We're in a fork in the road and we're taking it. We have had, this is conceptual, ability to say that an HIV vaccine is possible. There was a study that was done in Thailand that had a Overall, about a 30 % efficacy. It's about 60 % in the first year that then waned over time. And we've developed a number of public- private partnerships, funded between the NIH and the Gates Foundation and private industry because that's where manufacturing is to essentially build on that. Construct vaccines that Well, we think developed in a higher tighter the kinds of antibodies what we called non neutralizing antibodies that we think will do factor in the partial advocacy in the what we called the tied trial, RV144 trial. And those trials are actually just starting under way one of them is in South Africa, one of them Sort of in South Africa and subset here in Africa. So we are really sort of fixed into that area of being able to sort of evaluate whether this idea, and can we improve upon this idea? Most vaccines are made by neutralizing antibodies. We haven't been able to make neutralizing antibodies with HIV. That's a complicated issue, but the sugars and the construction of the virus That made that very difficult so but we have made enormous technological advances in isolating rather than neutralizing antibodies manufacturing them and giving them and we have a very large study that is ongoing and is really enrolling incredibly well. 1, 500 women in Africa are getting an IV medication every two months. It's not that we think that IV medication will actually do this, but it's a concept study to define what levels of neutralization will prevent infection, and can we make a vaccine or can we make antibodies that could be delivered by this prior technology or by subcutaneous involvement? So, We have this two approaches and we do feel actually like I say quite optimistic that we will be able to do something here. I know one thing that scientist don't like doing. And I'm gonna ask you to do it anyway. Is that cast forward how far off is this how far off is the vaccine? Well, I think the efficacy trials that we'll look at one will come in April of 2019, the other one will come in April 2020 and the other one 2021. So we really have sorta 19, 20, and 21 will actually sorta tells us, reset the field and tell us just how close we are. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]