News (Updated July 17,
2011)
[Home]
[Previous
news]
By DONNA GORDON
BLANKINSHIP
The Associated Press
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
A dozen scientists or
teams of researchers will each get an additional $1 million over five years to
take their ideas to the next level and see if they have the potential to save
lives, the foundation announced Wednesday.
The foundation initially
chose more than 500 scientific ideas out of nearly 20,000 proposals for its
Grand Challenges Explorations grants, worth $100,000 each, saying it would be
taking a calculated risk by giving money for whatever wacky idea the world's
best minds come up with to combat malaria, HIV and other world health problems.
The ideas remain highly
speculative into the $1 million stage.
"They run against
conventional wisdom," said Chris Wilson, director of the foundation's
Global Health Discovery program. "Of course, more often than not,
conventional wisdom is right."
As an example, he points
to the idea of using microwaves to kill malaria parasites, from within their
hosts — mice for the experiment, but humans eventually.
"That's probably not
going to work,"
The scientist, Jose Stoute,
a medical researcher who specializes in infectious diseases at
"Science is a place
where lots of things don't work," he said, adding that the foundation
remains optimistic about these grants. "I think we're cautiously optimistic
that somewhere along this path, some of these might happen," he said.
To graduate to a million
dollar grant, the scientists have to prove their initial idea has merit as a
potential way to save lives and that it is practical and potentially scalable
and affordable,
Stoute said he and his
co-collaborator, Carmenza Spadafora at
Since the malaria parasite
naturally collects iron as a byproduct of its actions within the human body,
they thought malaria might be another good target for microwave treatment.
Stoute is working with microwave engineers to design a machine to deliver the
treatment in the lab.
Collaboration among
different kinds of scientists is an attribute of many of the Grand Challenges
projects.
Mike McCune, professor of
medicine at the
His project, to fight HIV
infection while a fetus is in the uterus, takes a number of known scientific
principals and combines them in a new way.
He is working to utilize
what scientists already know about the unique and effective immune system of the
human fetus, plus the way vaccines work on newborns and the success so far at
decreasing the number of HIV transmissions from mother to child in this country.
Considering how much blood
passes from mother to baby while an HIV-affected mother is pregnant, McCune says
it's nearly miraculous that most of those babies of those mothers are not born
HIV-positive. Most are affected later through breastfeeding or via blood at
birth. His goal is to strengthen and prolong a child's natural immunity.
For now, McCune is testing
his theories on non-human primates, by giving vaccines to mothers who hopefully
will pass immunity along to their fetuses.
"This is not science
fiction. Everything I've told you has a longstanding history to it," McCune
said. "The Gates grant allows me and others to take existing dogmas and
paradigms and throw them out the window."
Not all the projects take
a high tech approach to fighting disease.
Some scientists are
looking at more practical considerations such as the way existing disease
fighting solutions are applied, like Teun Bousema, an epidemiologist at the
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Radboud University Nijmegen
Medical Centre in the
Bousema want to work
toward eliminating malaria in African villages by targeting all the
interventions — from spraying insecticides to installing bed nets and killing
mosquito larvae — around the people who get bit the most. He learned with his
earlier Gates grant that those people can be identified through blood tests.
Up to this point, most
malaria prevention and treatment has focused on the most vulnerable populations,
such as children, but Bousema said that approach will never lead to elimination
of the disease.
Humans and mosquitoes are
both required for malaria to spread, so the approach has to be targeted and
thorough.
"Some critics may
question whether this is cost-effective," said Bousema, acknowledging that
his approach may be costly per person but he theorizes they would only need to
target a few households to effectively help a whole village.
His idea could be applied
to any new malaria-fighting tool that is developed. If a new vaccine is
developed to block malaria transmission, it would likely be impossible to give
it to everyone in
Published: July 15
In his July 5 op-ed
column, “The path to an AIDS vaccine,” Michael Gerson celebrated two recent
“breakthroughs” that might lead to an AIDS vaccine. Although Mr. Gerson
correctly noted that these discoveries are unrelated, he misperceived their
relative significance.
Mr. Gerson first mentioned
the results of a trial by the Army’s U.S. Military HIV Research Program led by
Col. Nelson Michael in collaboration with Sanofi-Pasteur and colleagues in
Second, Mr. Gerson
mentioned an antiviral (or neutralizing) antibody discovered by the NIH Vaccine
Research Center (VRC) that will be produced and injected into humans, hopefully
to provide a temporary block against HIV infection. The practical value of this
pricey, abstract venture for advancing AIDS vaccines is quite debatable. The VRC
antibody target is not new; it has been repeatedly explored, but never realized,
as a vaccine target for more than a decade. Moreover, assertions that HIV is
only “vulnerable in one place” targeted by the VRC antibody are inaccurate.
Perhaps unknowingly, Mr. Gerson listed one of the best reasons: Evidence
suggests that antibodies responsible for the success of the Thai trial are not
ones that duplicate the properties of the VRC antibody.
A key point in all of
these findings is that there may be many ways to block HIV infection with a
vaccine, and they may be revealed to an open mind.
Researchers are hoping
they are one step closer to a HIV vaccine – using HIV. At the 6th
International AIDS Society Conference on HIV Pathogens, Treatment, and
Prevention in
The vaccine is a
genetically altered version of SIV, the version of HIV found in non-human
primates. Over the course of six months, five infected monkeys were injected
with the vaccine three times, while five others were given a placebo vaccine.
After 18 months, it was found that 40% of the vaccinated monkeys had very low to
undetectable amounts of virus in their bodies.
“We are well on the path
to a functional cure, at least in monkeys,” says Laurent Humeau, VirxSys
vice president of research and development.
“Although this
pre-clinical study is modest in terms of size, it is highly unusual to see near
non-detectable levels of the virus not only circulating in the blood, but also
in the reservoirs where HIV is known to replicate,” said Joep Lange, M.D.,
Ph.D., professor of medicine at the Academic Medical Center, University of
Amsterdam, and head of the Amsterdam Institute of Global Health and Development.
In the monkeys, the
vaccine’s effect was sustained two years after the initial vaccination,
without the need for any booster shots.
Other researchers have
created similar type therapeutic vaccines. In May, Dr. Louis Picker of the
Oregon Health and
But making the leap from
monkeys to humans is a big step. Therapeutic vaccines "have looked really
good in monkeys – but monkeys are not people and SIV is not HIV," said
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Disease. "Really good concepts in primates have been duds in people.”
Unlike many antiretroviral
drugs on the market, a therapeutic vaccine such as VRX1273 has the
potential to be a cost effective way of dealing with HIV. Unlike
drugs that are taken for the entire course of a patient's lifetime, this
vaccine has the potential to administered just several times, possibly only
once, over the course of a patient's life.
Humeau believes that he
and his team are headed in the right direction and hope to start clinical trials
in humans as soon as 18 months with approval from the
5th Jul 2011, 2:38 pm by
Olivia D'Orazio
Inovio Pharmaceuticals (AMEX:INO)
announced Tuesday that data from preclinical animal studies of its SynCon DNA
vaccine against HIV, which was published in two different scientific journals,
showed that the vaccine protected against the the disease in non-human primates.
Both peer-review journals,
Vaccine and PLoS One, published two separate papers.
The first study saw
scientists generate a synthetic DNA vaccine specific to HIV sub-type C, which is
most prevalent in Africa,
The study showed high
levels of immune response, up to three times greater than comparable DNA
vaccines that target HIV, the company said.
Inovio said it plans to
conduct two phase one clinical studies to test the immunogenicity of this
optimized sub-type C HIV vaccine in humans in the
The second study published
assessed the protective effect of Inovio's PENNVAX HIV DNA vaccine, by examining
an equivalent vaccine for the corresponding monkey virus, SIV (simian
immunodeficiency virus), the company said.
The drug was administered
using Inovio's proprietary electroporation (EP) technology, which increases the
uptake of the vaccine. Pennvax was found to increase the production of several
gene sequences, including those involved in immune cell trafficking and
cell cycle progression.
Significantly, vaccinated
animals were protected from a subsequent injection of SIV, demonstrating strong
control of viral replication and significantly lower viral load, while also
displaying antigen-specific immune cell responses. Contrarily, non-vaccinated
animals failed to control the virus.
"This new preclinical
data further validates the ability of Inovio's vaccines to induce powerful
antigen-specific immune responses," said president and CEO, Dr. J. Joseph
Kim.
"Collectively, these
clinical and preclinical studies further substantiate our product development
efforts in these important disease areas."
The two upcoming phase one
trials will involve the Pennvax-G vaccine, which covers sub-types A, C and D,
and is currently being tested in a 92-patient phase one clinical study in the
Another phase one study
will begin in mid-2012 with the intradermal Pennvax-GP vaccine, which is being
developed as part of a multi-year $25 million plus contract from the National
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease.
Inovio's stock on the AMEX
Exchange jumped 11.02% to trade at $0.677 per share as of 1:27pm EDT on Tuesday.
By Randy Dotinga
HealthDay Reporter
THURSDAY, July 14 (HealthDay
News) -- Researchers report that they've gained insight into the workings of the
immune system's response to HIV, the AIDS virus, in certain people, potentially
providing a boost as scientists work toward a vaccine.
The findings won't have an
immediate big impact on either vaccine research or HIV treatment. However, they
do reveal how soldiers of the immune system known as antibodies use special
powers to combat the virus in some patients, said study co-author Dr. Michel C.
Nussenzweig, a professor of immunology at The Rockefeller University in New York
City.
Ultimately, he said,
scientists could develop a vaccine that teaches people's bodies how to make the
antibodies. "You'd try to make them do it themselves," he said,
instead of pumping antibodies into the body.
Since the late 1990s, AIDS
has largely become a treatable, chronic disease. But it can still be deadly, and
many scientists think they're years away from developing a vaccine to prevent
people from becoming infected in the first place.
In the new study,
published online July 14 in Science, researchers focused on antibodies that are
produced only in certain patients with HIV. They work by preventing the virus
from picking the locks in cells that are supposed to keep germs out.
The problem is that the
antibodies don't help cells that have already been infected, Nussenzweig said.
And the antibodies only appear about two to three years after someone has been
infected with the virus, he said. It's not clear how much the antibodies help
those people.
Nussenzweig and colleagues
were able to clone the antibodies from four patients. "It's possible that
if you were to have enough of these things, there might even be a therapy"
for people with the virus, he said. In other words, the antibodies could become
part of a drug.
However, the antibodies
don't live long, meaning patients would have to undergo repeated and regular
treatments if they wanted the protection they may be able to provide, he said.
For now, he said, the research seems more likely to help the development of a
vaccine.
U.S. National Institutes
of Health vaccine researcher Dr. John Mascola said the findings extend
"prior work to show that the human immune system can make antibodies that
target vulnerable regions of HIV."
Dr. Jonathan D. Fuchs,
director of Vaccine Studies at the San Francisco Department of Public Health,
said the findings represent an "important advance" because they help
define the types of antibodies that vaccines need to elicit in the body.
Groundbreaking studies
suggest tablets could help partners of people with HIV protect themselves –
secretly, if necessary
Sarah Boseley, Health
editor
guardian.co.uk, Thursday
14 July 2011
Antiretroviral drugs can
help the partners of people with HIV protect themselves from infection.
Photograph: Susan Sterner/Associated Press
The partners of people who
have HIV can protect themselves from infection by taking a once-daily pill, two
groundbreaking studies in
The discovery could bring
work to combat Aids close to a "tipping point", experts say. Attempts
to promote condom use to protect against HIV in the hardest-hit parts of the
world, and particularly
But now it appears that
men or women who know – or suspect – their partner has HIV could protect
themselves, secretly if necessary. The larger study, involving 4,758
"discordant" couples (where one has HIV but the other has not) in
Kenya and Uganda, led by the University of Washington's International Clinical
Research Centre, shows that those taking a single daily tablet of the Aids drug
tenofovir had 62% fewer infections and those who took a pill combining tenofovir
and emtricitabine had 73% fewer infections than those who took a placebo pill.
The drugs have few
side-effects, which is important if they are to be given to healthy individuals.
Both are made by
"This study
demonstrates that antiretrovirals are a highly potent and fundamental
cornerstone for HIV prevention and should become an integral part of global
efforts for HIV prevention," said Dr Connie Celum, professor of global
health and medicine at the university and principal investigator of the study,
known as the Partners PrEP Study, which was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation.
The second study in
"This is a major
scientific breakthrough which re-confirms the essential role that antiretroviral
medicine has to play in the Aids response," said Michel Sidibé, Executive
Director of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/Aids (UNAids). "These
studies could help us to reach the tipping point in the HIV epidemic."
The news follows hard on
the heels of another very significant finding – that people with HIV who are
taking combinations of antiretroviral drugs not only stay healthy themselves but
are unlikely to infect their partner.
The two pieces of research
give a massive boost to the cause of rolling out more Aids drugs and treating
people at the earliest stage of their illness.
"Effective new HIV
prevention tools are urgently needed, and these studies could have enormous
impact in preventing heterosexual transmission," said Dr Margaret Chan,
WHO's director general. "WHO will be working with countries to use the new
findings to protect more men and women from HIV infection."