Glimmers of hope at IAVI

Dec 2nd, 2009 1:36 PM UTC
By Kara Arsenault

Last week, I was lucky enough to chat with Fran Priddy, a senior director of medical affairs at International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI). She filled me in on their organization, and all that the work that they’re up to these days—just in time for our World AIDS Day blog series.

Tell me a bit about IAVI?

Our name stands for International AIDS Vaccine Initiative. We were founded about 13 years ago to help accelerate the development of a preventive AIDS vaccine. I think our mission really describes us well: ensure the development of safe, effective, accessible, preventive HIV vaccines for use throughout the world. We work on every aspect of HIV vaccine development, from work in the lab developing new AIDS vaccine candidates for testing to work with the communities to then test the AIDS vaccine candidates.

What’s a typical day like there?

It really depends on what your role is and where you are based. If you’re a nurse in India, you could be giving a vaccine to a trial participant. If you’re a nurse in South Africa, you could be drawing the blood of a trial participant to see what kind of immune responses the vaccine elicited. In East Africa, a clinician could be administering an HIV test for someone who wants to participate in an epidemiology study. In New York, a scientist could be studying blood samples from HIV positive people to look for clues on how to control the virus.

How do you decide where to test for the vaccine?

We usually look for partners that have a solid background in research—universities, medical labs—and in places where we know the epidemic is severe. There has to be community acceptance and desire to do the research, too. So far, we’ve worked in places from Zambia and South Africa to East Africa to India.

Have you been on the ground to see IAVI’s work in action?

I see our impact the most when I visit our partners who are conducting studies. Each research center has a Community Advisory Board (CAB). It’s made up of people from all parts of the community—people who have HIV and want to protect their families, people who participated in trials before, the clergy, mothers and fathers. They make sure the community has a voice and that their concerns are heard. It’s a great experience because you really get to see how HIV has affected each one of them. It’s a big commitment—but they want this to work and they want the research to advance.

Did anyone’s story really stick with you?

I met one CAB member who was a young woman—probably in her early twenties—and just a regular member of the community. She was HIV-infected and had a family. She was very soft-spoken—quite shy—but she really wanted to be on the Community Advisory Board. She didn’t need to make this commitment—she was newly diagnosed, had a new baby, English was not her first language, and many other people on the board had a higher level of education. But her dedication said a lot. She stuck her neck out so that she could help others.

It’s seems like there’s been lots of exciting news for your organization lately. For instance, the results of the trial in Thailand? I heard it was a hot topic at the recent AIDS vaccine conference in Paris.

Although IAVI was not directly involved in the RV144 trial in Thailand, the results were very exciting for us and others in the AIDS vaccine field. The results showed for the first time that a vaccine could prevent HIV infection in humans. The vaccine combination reduced the risk of HIV infection by about 30 percent. That’s a big deal. But we need to do—and we can do—better.

In other exciting news, IAVI and several partners discovered two new broadly neutralizing antibodies. Now we have to learn as much as possible about them to help us figure out how we can make a vaccine that will cause the antibodies to be produced in the body and prevent HIV from taking hold in the first place. It’s important to let people know how excited we are about these recent advances. It validates a lot of what we’re doing. It tells us we’re on the right track.

How did you first get interested in studying HIV/AIDS?

I’m a physician. I went to med school in San Francisco in the early 1990’s. I spent a lot of time learning how to care for people dying from AIDS. It was such a huge part of medicine then.

Things have changed drastically in those hospitals today—but there are still many parts of the world where it looks just like the hospital where I did my med school training. I’ve lived and worked in Africa and I’ve seen a lot of what HIV can do when there is not enough treatment available. To me, in the long run, a vaccine is the only solution. Treatment and other types of prevention are really important, but I think a vaccine is the real answer. I love helping people with HIV— and I’m happy to work on a vaccine if it means less people in the world have to live with the disease.

So how close do you think we are to an AIDS vaccine?

I don’t have the answer to that. I wish I did. It’s been very difficult so far—largely for scientific reasons. HIV is a retrovirus, which can mutate and change very quickly. What that means is that it’s hard to develop an effective vaccine because the virus is constantly mutating and changing to avoid detection by the immune system. They change the make-up of the flu vaccine every year—but the AIDS virus can change every day. There are some exciting glimmers of hope, which is really motivating. And we probably know more than we’ve ever known today. So it’s false to say we’re close, but we’re going to keep moving ahead.

TAGS: From Our Partners, IAVI, World AIDS Day, World AIDS Day 2009