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Patrick Kelly crosses the finish line during last year’s ‘Hope Springs Eternal’ run to commemorate National HIV Vaccine Awareness Day. (Photo courtesy the Hope Clinic)
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HIV Vaccine
Awareness Day events
The Hope Clinic of the Emory Vaccine Center
603 Church St., Decatur
404-377-3719 or 877-424-HOPE
vaccine@emory.edu
“The role of the Black Church in combating HIV/AIDS in the African-American Community: Focusing on HIV Vaccines”
May 18, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Hopewell Baptist Church
182 Hunter St., Norcross
Sponsored by the Hope Clinic, SisterLove Inc. and Hopewell Baptist Church
Hope Springs Eternal 5K Run/Walk
May 19
8 a.m. race-day registration; 9 a.m. run
Main Pavilion, Decatur Square
$25 registration fee by May 16; $30 after
404-327-7738
www.rungeorgia.com/hopeeternal.html |
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HOME > COMMUNITY > COMMUNITY FEATURE
By: DYANA BAGBY
and COMMENTS |
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TEN YEARS AGO NEXT WEEK, PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON gave the commencement speech at the historically black college Morgan State University in Maryland and called on scientists to find an HIV vaccine.
“Here at home, we are grateful that new and effective anti-HIV strategies are available and bringing longer and better lives to those who are infected, but we dare not be complacent,” Clinton said in his May 18, 1997, speech. “HIV is capable of mutating and becoming resistant to therapies and could well become even more dangerous. Only a truly effective, preventive HIV vaccine can limit and eventually eliminate the threat of AIDS.
“Today, let us commit ourselves to developing an AIDS vaccine within the next decade,” he added. “There are no guarantees. It will take energy and focus and demand great effort from our greatest minds. But with the strides of recent years, it is no longer a question of whether we can develop an AIDS vaccine, it is simply a question of when.”
Although a decade later no vaccine is available, researchers say they are making huge strides in finding a vaccine. Dr. Mark Mulligan, executive director of the Hope Clinic of the Emory Vaccine Center, believes one will be developed in our lifetime.
“I think there is genuine excitement in the field,” says Mulligan, who has worked in vaccine research since 1989.
THE EMORY VACCINE Center is working on several clinical trials for an HIV vaccine and is a worldwide leader in HIV vaccine research. One ongoing trial at the Hope Clinic is the Step Study, a multi-center international study of an HIV vaccine developed by Merck & Co. Inc.
Out of some 3,000 male and female volunteers between the ages of 18 and 45 worldwide, the Hope Clinic has 130 volunteers participating in the Phase II clinical trial, Mulligan says.
The study has enrolled volunteers who are HIV negative and generally healthy, but who have certain risk factors for HIV. The vaccine candidate used in this study has generated strong and durable cellular immune responses against HIV in early human trials, according to Mulligan.
The Step Study is a collaboration of Merck & Co., Inc., the HIV Vaccine Trials Network and the National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases, which funds and supports the HVTN.
The vaccine candidate, known as the MRKAd5 HIV-1 gag/pol/nef, or trivalent, vaccine, is based on adenovirus, a common cold virus that has been modified so that it cannot reproduce and cause a cold in humans, Mulligan explains.
The adenovirus is used as a vector, or a delivery vehicle, to transport three synthetically produced HIV genes into cells. These genes stimulate the body to generate a potent cellular immune response to HIV, producing an army of killer T-cells programmed to recognize and kill HIV-infected cells, he adds. No live HIV is used in the production of the vaccine candidate, so the vaccine candidate cannot cause HIV infection or AIDS, Mulligan stresses.
“Those we are using now are much stronger than they were just five to 10 years ago,” he says.
PATRICK KELLY, A GAY MAN AND spokesperson for the Atlanta-based National AIDS Education & Services for Minorities, says the reason it is important to recognize National HIV Vaccine Awareness Day is to spotlight the need for volunteers to participate in clinical trials.
Kelly, who sits on the community advisory board for the Hope Clinic, says he knows the skepticism many African Americans have when it comes to clinical trials, noting the unethical experiments on Tuskegee, Ala., farmers between 1932-1972. The sharecroppers were denied syphilis treatment as part of a study of the disease.
NAESM, the Hope Clinic, SisterLove Inc. and Hopewell Baptist Church, as well as other organizations including AID Atlanta and AIDS Survival Project, are working together to put on a symposium May 18 to dispel myths of participating in HIV vaccine clinical trials. The symposium is also reaching out specifically to the African-American community and the black church.
“The only way a vaccine can work is if people enter into trials,” Kelly says. “We especially need black people to participate. HIV is affecting our community drastically — men, women, children, young and old. We need to get into the trials.”
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