Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Our Call for NIH to Quadruple AIDS Cure Spending is in Nature Medicine!

Today, as we were putting out a fund raising letter for our group, we were pleased to see our demand--that the NIH spend $240 million for direct AIDS cure research--cited in the major scientific journal Nature Medicine. The NIH currently spends less than $60 million, or 3% of its AIDS research budget, on direct cure research.

Yet this is an opportunity for the US to do something great in the world while preserving our national interest: The US spends $24 billion on AIDS every year. AIDS will soon comprise half the US foreign aid budget. If we can develop a cure, we will solve one of the world's worst plagues and save billions upon billions of dollars every year.

So here's the fundraising pitch: The AIDS Policy Project is engaged in cutting-edge AIDS advocacy focused solely on a cure. We wrote the first plain-English report, "AIDS Cure Research for Everyone," on the scientific issues and political landscape around a cure. We held the first town meetings, and engaged the top researchers in the field. We gave the first award to Gero Huetter, the man who cured the Berlin Patient, on the steps of San Francisco City Hall on behalf of the people of San Francisco. Our investigation yielded the fact that the NIH was spending only 3% to find a cure. We will be the first organization that crowdsources new AIDS cure ideas online. And this was Year 1 of our campaign.

Please consider making a contribution to more groundbreaking AIDS advocacy.

One of our goals is to raise awareness of the lack of funding for AIDS cure research--raise it in the larger scientific community, in the general public, and most of all among funders including US Congress and the White House. And awareness is certainly growing--for instance, there was a major article in New York Magazine about this issue last week, which we pitched and where we are quoted (barely). But we are the only group to publicly call for more funding for a cure. We are shaping events, not just monitoring them or trying to exploit them for fundraising. Power concedes nothing without a demand, to quote Frederick Douglass. It never has, and it never will.

We believe that the "scientific strategy" for a cure should include, among other things, enough funding so that major, scientifically worthy cure projects are not delayed by years due to lack of money. This is not currently the case.

Can we hold the NIH to its brand-new commitment to, as Tony Fauci recently put it, "Pull out all the stops" to develop a cure?

Together we can.
Please make a contribution to our June AIDS advocacy campaign--our goal is to raise $30,000 by June 30.

Join us. You will look back on this moment and be proud that you did.

Thanks,

Kate Krauss, for everyone at the AIDS Policy Project


Nature Medicine: On thirtieth anniversary, calls for HIV cure research intensify

Nature Medicine 17, 643 (2011) doi:10.1038/nm0611-643
Published online 06 June 2011

NATURE MEDICINE | NEWS

On thirtieth anniversary, calls for HIV cure research intensify
Lucas Laursen

Thirty years ago this month, scientists first reported the existence of AIDS, and in the intervening decades researchers have focused steady efforts on prevention, long-term treatments such as antiretroviral drugs, and patient care. What has fallen in and out of
fashion during that time is seeking a 'cure' for HIV. That changed when scientists reported that they had cured one man of the virus through a bone marrow transplant (Blood 117, 2791–2799, 2011). But the circumstances of that 2007 transplant were unique, and researchers say they are uncertain about how to fund additional cure-directed research
without cannibalizing other components of the global HIV/AIDS research machine.

“That's the tricky part,” says Bertrand Audoin, executive director of the International AIDS Society (IAS), a Geneva-based HIV research and education association. “Actually, to be honest, I'm glad it's not for me to decide.”

To address the issue, the IAS has invited a working group to its biennial research meeting in Rome this July to hash out ideas about how to include cure research within the existing framework of HIV/AIDS studies. “Our goal after the Rome meeting is to have enough scientific ideas to reach out to new donors,” Audoin says, though they will only ask for pledges this year. Funding requests for specific avenues of cure research will have to wait until the working group releases a more formal scientific strategy at the July 2012 meeting in Washington, DC.

So far, funding earmarked for cure research is a tiny fraction of overall HIV/AIDS spending, says David Margolis, a virologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a member of the IAS working group. The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) is funding
cure-related research to the tune of $13 million a year out of its $3.5 billion annual AIDS research budget, with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine contributing comparable amounts. The Rome meeting should help
researchers nail down “several specific areas or projects that should be developed,” Margolis says. 

The AIDS Policy Project, an advocacy group in Philadelphia, has been lobbying for the NIH to raise its investment in cure research to $240 million a year.

:)

Cure-related research takes various forms. As researchers have grown better at suppressing HIV activity with antiretroviral drugs, they are now reaching for other tools that might draw out the virus from its cellular hiding places in order to destroy it. Margolis and his
colleagues, including Daria Hazuda of the drug giant Merck, have patented a therapy using a leukemia drug called Zolinza (vorinostat) because it forces dormant, HIV-hosting immune cells into dividing and exposes the virus to a possible sterilizing cure. “Purging is going to
be one approach, but there are going to be others,” says immunologist James Hoxie of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia, including gene therapy that modifies a patient's immune system with mutant genes that help keep HIV under control, without antiretroviral drugs. “The people who control funding need to take advantage of extraordinary events,” such as the successful gene therapy reported in Blood, Hoxie says. “This should encourage additional funding, not remove it from other programs.”

Deenan Pillay, a virologist at University College London, argues that the idea of clearing HIV in the body head on, which has not been accomplished with any other virus, is “nice to rationalize by saying it's more cost effective” than lifelong antiretroviral treatment. “But
the big issue in HIV is not necessarily eradication versus treatment but rather making the benefits of treatment available worldwide,” he says. Achieving either one will require prioritization. “If we want to do it properly, the best way is not to look at who can give more money,” Audoin says, “but first to agree on what the scientific strategy should be and what we really want to achieve.”

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