Philadelphia BTAN IAVI Visit Report
On Thursday, December 16th, my Philadelphia BTAN Co-Chair Danielle M. Parks and I (John Elliott Churchville) visited and toured the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) laboratory in Brooklyn, New York. The visit had been arranged by the Black AIDS Institute (BAI). We were joined by Phill Wilson and A. Cornelius Baker, BAI’s President/CEO and Board President, respectively, as well as BAI national staff members and our BTAN counterpart Co-Chairs from Houston, TX and Jackson, MS.
Our day at IAVI began with a welcome breakfast followed by welcoming remarks and a program overview by IAVI’s President and CEO, Seth Berkley. He passionately described IAVI’s world-wide mission to ensure the development of safe, effective, accessible, preventive HIV vaccines for use throughout the world. With offices in Nairobi, Kenya, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, New Delhi, India and Parktown, South Africa, IAVI has not only been able to attract and support some of the world’s brightest and best HIV researchers and scientists, but also to strategically locate them where the results of their work will most directly benefit the people most severely affected by the HIV pandemic. Seth also shared with us his excitement about IAVI’s and partners’ follow-up on their 2009 finding of two new, potent broadly neutralizing antibodies to HIV and identifying their binding site on the virus. Even more potent, broadly neutralizing antibodies were found in 2010 and are currently being studied. (Because HIV mutates early and often, a successful HIV vaccine must contain broadly neutralizing antibodies—i.e., rare substances that recognize and attack multiple variants or mutations of HIV.)
Following Seth’s remarks, Phill Wilson gave a brief history of the 10-year birthing process that brought forth the Black AIDS Institute and the strides that BAI has made since its inception. Then he introduced Jeffrey Crowley, Director of the White House Office of National AIDS Policy.
Jeffrey Crowley shared President Obama’s conviction that despite fiscal limitations, there was bipartisan support for the work of his office, and that he did not anticipate any change in direction stemming from the recent mid-term election results. He encouraged all of us to be familiar with the National HIV Strategy and the National Implementation Plan as starting places for our advocacy work.
A panel discussion followed which was moderated by Lisa Beyer, IAVI’s Senior Vice President for Public Affairs. The panelists featured all the above-named speakers with the addition of Tokes Osubu, CEO of Gay Men of African Descent (GMAD). Immediately after the related Q & A session, we were led on a tour of the facility by Rick King, IAVI’s Laboratory Vice President.
After putting on our laboratory coats, gloves and goggles, we were led into the lab of IAVI’s Principal Scientist, Sanjay Phogat, who, with his world-wide team of colleagues, had discovered the two powerful broadly neutralizing antibodies against HIV, and had identified a target on the virus to which these antibodies bind. I cannot adequately describe the personal impact that meeting this very brilliant, humble, committed and passionate HIV superhero had on me. It is one thing to understand the passion of those of us who are fighting the HIV/AIDS battle in the trenches of counseling, testing and linking persons to care, but it is quite another to experience first-hand the passion exhibited by scientists committed to finding an HIV vaccine that will work anywhere and everywhere in the world to halt all future HIV infections. And Dr. Phogat was not the only passionate and committed scientist that we met at IAVI: every single lab that we visited was headed and staffed by people who were fixated on either: 1) designing and developing vaccine candidates to prevent HIV infection; 2) designing and developing vaccine candidates to control HIV infection; or 3) accelerating vaccine candidates to clinical trials and advancing the most promising to efficacy trials.
The day at IAVI so impacted me that I felt obligated to share its highlights with all of my known co-workers in the HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment arena of struggle. Although our struggle must continue in earnest, there is indeed light at the end of the tunnel…and it is not a freight train headed in our direction. Rather, it is a light of hope and encouragement that everything we do matters. We must believe that our unswerving persistence in this work will eventuate in the successful eradication of HIV as a debilitating disease within our very own lifetime. A luta continua!
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