BALTIMORE, Md.-Robert Gallo, the co-discoverer of the AIDS virus, and other leading AIDS researchers meeting here say that, as experimental vaccines enter clinical trials, the time is ripe for a new era of heightened scientific cooperation.
"We now know more about HIV virus and AIDS than any other microbe and disease in the history of medical science," said Gallo, director of UMBI's Institute of Human Virology at IHV's annual international symposium.
"Now, with so many basic science findings in place, we have to form more trusting relationships. Competition is useful but is being pushed aside. This is a big change." Healthy scientific competition in the 1990's helped researchers uncover the basic workings of the virus, he added.
On Friday, September 15, 1 to 5 p.m., twelve of the 130 speakers at the IHV symposium of some 800 participants will present findings on the testing new AIDS vaccine strategies. The 6-day event is at the Renaissance Harborplace Hotel, in Baltimore.
"If by 2005, we do not see very substantive advances in HIV vaccines, I will be both disappointed and surprised. There are vaccines coming out of laboratories now that seem to me to be real possibilities with the right combinations. He added that scientists' problems with understanding HIV in the past could now be overcome.
Underlying the call for more collaboration, Gallo said, is the need to respond more quickly to the AIDS epidemic, which worldwide approaches about 40 million people infected and getting worse rapidly.
Seth Berkeley, executive director of the non-profit International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, said, "A vaccine represents the best hope. However there are globally limited resources going into AIDS vaccine development. Currently there is less than two percent of all AIDS expenditures and less than ten percent of the research funds going into vaccine development."
The technology to produce an AIDS vaccine is an international public good that will benefit companies who invest in it, he said. But Berkeley also said, "There is a business problem of expensive efficacy trials and unresolved issues of commercialization in the Third World. The science problem, he said, is that AIDS vaccine development still lacks testing data in humans, and not enough is being done to set up trials. "As a result, companies are not investing and vaccines are not moving up quickly enough.
"Over the long term we have got to create better tools to end the epidemic (such as vaccines). It is a global priority of the utmost, yet we have not yet treated it that way."
Co-discoverer of HIV, Luc Montagnier of Queens College in New York and formerly of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France, agrees that more scientific cooperation is needed to hasten AIDS vaccine development, but cautions that not enough is known yet about the biological impact of the AIDS disease for researchers to feel very confident about a vaccine yet. "Almost everything is known about the virus, this is true, but less is known about the disease than we would like. It is very complex disease and includes varying factors that cause the disease in humans. These will change how we treat the disease and use the vaccines." Montagnier, added, "We should be doing more research in Africa where the epidemic is the worst."
Peter Piot, executive director of UNAIDS, admonished the AIDS researchers, "We are only in the beginning of the impact of the epidemic. What we are seeing today in the most affected countries in Africa is only the beginning." He said the epidemic is comparable to the plague in medieval Europe that killed ten to twenty percent of the population and took over a century for those societies "to overcome."
"What I expect from you, the scientists, is to continue to work together on the enormous job of knowing HIV in all its facets. Investments where the problem really is are being neglected. We need to turn our AIDS research agenda into a truly global agenda."
He added that any university getting a grant for AIDS research in a developing country should share the overhead funding with that country and not send it back to the American and European institutions. "It is a moral imperative," he said.
Piot added a personal note, "It is not enough to have the truth and the facts and to convince others. Working with AIDS is an exercise in humility. You see the limitations are of what one can do and you are confronted with your own vulnerabilities. We have a common responsibility to keep hope alive for the millions and millions of people who are desperate today because they are living in a community full of AIDS.
Mark Kaplan, director of the North Shore University Hospital, said the large IHV annual meeting is also a major stimulant to development of vaccines and preventative therapeutics at the local level in developing countries. "This is very effective from the science standpoint. It is an incredibly powerful meeting with probably the most dramatic collection of the best minds in this field I have ever seen."
See http://www.ihv.org/ihv%20htmls/2000mtg.html for the remainder of the symposium program. The IHV is at 725 W. Lombard Street, Baltimore, Md. 21201. Phone: 410-328-8674. Fax: 410-328-9106.