An HIV-vaccine project led by EpiVax Inc. and its founder’s Brown University lab has gotten a fresh infusion of cash, $390,380 over two years from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to optimize a delivery system for the vaccine.
The grant is much smaller than the $2.2 million the National Institutes of Health awarded to the GAIA Vaccine Foundation project in 2002, but Dr. Anne S. De Groot said it will not only support important studies, but she also hopes it opens the door to additional funding.
It’s been 27 years since the first AIDS cases were found in Los Angeles, but as successful as scientists have been at developing treatments, they have yet to find a way to stop the spread of the human immunodeficiency virus.
Worldwide, about 33 million people were living with HIV as of last year, according to the United Nations AIDS organization – including about 2.7 million new infections. About 2 million people died from AIDS-related disease, 72 percent of them in sub-Saharan Africa.
Developing an HIV vaccine, experts agree, is only one of several things that must be done to reverse the epidemic; improving access to antiretroviral drugs is also crucial, and in many countries, major work has to be done to change cultural norms and promote safe sex.
Coming up with an effective HIV vaccine has also proven extremely difficult. HIV keeps mutating, so what works against a strain tested in the lab may not protect against HIV strains in the outside world – much less in Africa or Asia.
Developing an effective delivery system is also tough, De Groot noted in an interview, as shown by the failure of the STEP study, a clinical trial of an HIV vaccine delivered within a weakened common-cold virus that was stopped last year after the vaccine was proven not only not to work, but to actually increase some people’s vulnerability to HIV.
De Groot’s project aims to address both problems and create an HIV vaccine that is universal – thus the name GAIA – and safe and cheap to deliver.
The basic concept, she said, is to treat HIV like a language with many dialects. Each may sound different, and use many words that aren’t the same, but there are also many common elements. Through computer analyses of scores of HIV strains, De Groot and her team have identified a large number of “words” – protein pieces – common to multiple HIV variants, whereas the STEP vaccine only used three “words” found in the most common U.S. strain.
The next step, De Groot explained, was to string the pieces together into “sentences” that the immune system could understand, while recognizing the “words” individually. The resulting vaccine successfully induced a “broad immune response” to HIV in mice, she said.
“There’s no other vaccine like that,” she said.
Now the challenge is to develop an effective delivery system, and that’s where the new grant comes in. EpiVax is looking to put its vaccine in DNA that it would grow in E. coli cultures, a very inexpensive approach – “which is very important,” De Groot said, “because we want to make the vaccine available to people in areas at risk who don’t have money to pay for it.”
De Groot’s plan actually calls for providing the vaccine for free to people in poor regions through a nonprofit group she started, the GAIA Vaccine Foundation, which is also involved in international AIDS education and advocacy, especially in Mali. The foundation has set a goal of starting clinical trials of a vaccine in Mali by 2012, and it’s laying the groundwork by developing a “model clinic” in the African nation to promote good clinical practices.
But first De Groot and her team need to obtain substantially more money; her hope, she said, is that this new grant and the work it finances will make it easier to get additional funds. To actually develop the vaccine, she said, the lab will need an estimated $10 million infusion.
“When you consider that, in relation to the kind of money being thrown around in Iraq, and the money being provided to banks that made bad decisions about mortgage-backed securities, it’s a minute amount of money that would be very well spent,” she said. •
