AIDSVAX® Program: “A Path to an HIV Vaccine”
Description
Program Updates
Publications
GSID Consortium Members
Related Links
Description
From the beginning, one of GSID's primary goals has been to develop an HIV vaccine. Although considerable progress has been made in developing drugs to treat existing HIV infections, much less progress has been made in developing a vaccine to prevent infections altogether. A safe and effective vaccine solution is needed to halt the pandemic spread of this dangerous virus, especially in the developing world.
Under the leadership of GSID's founders, VaxGen conducted the world's first Phase III clinical trials for an HIV vaccine between 1998 and 2003. Upon founding GSID, one of our first projects was to transfer the clinical data and specimens collected during the VAX003 and VAX004 trials (for more information on the AIDSVAX trial design see here). The specimen repository currently contains over 300,000 tubes of serological material and the clinical database contains over 1.2 million clinical report forms of completed over the course two phase III trials. The specimen repository and clinical database have played a significant role in supporting the analysis of the RV 144 results and will continue doing so to further understand the hypotheses generated during the correlates of protection studies. For more on RV144, please see here.
Next, we assembled a consortium of principal investigators, from both academia and the private sector, who could bring together their experience and the latest tools to analyze the specimens and the data. For the latest on our research, please see the materials at the bottom of this section.
Knowing that we cannot tackle HIV alone, we have developed a web-accessible data browser containing clinical and viral sequence information related to the HIV infected subjects who participated in the VaxGen Phase III clinical trials and have made it available to the broader HIV research community. For more information, please visit the GSID HIV Data Browser.
In 2009, consortium member Dr. Phil Berman and his lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz, identified a novel element in the HIV coat protein that could be useful for future vaccine development. The research was published in the Journal of Virology, with Dr. Faruk Sinangil, the program's principal investigator, as one of the co-authors. An abstract of the paper is available here. Dr. Berman's lab has also received an NIH grant to pursue their findings further.
Program Updates
• Dr. Faruk Sinangil’s presentation at the Fourth Annual CAVD meeting, December 2009 (624k PDF File)
• Dr. Faruk Sinangil’s presentation at the Third Annual CAVD meeting, December 2008 (3.9 MB PDF File)
• Dr. Faruk Sinangil’s initial presentation about the GSID HIV Data Browser at the Second Annul CAVD meeting, December 2007 (868k PDF file)
Publications
For all publications by GSID authors, please see out publication page here.
GSID Consortium Members (Principal Investigator)
• University of California, Santa Cruz
• Monogram Biosciences
• Genoma
• PharmaStat
Related Links
• AIDSVAX® Program
• RV144 and Related Trials
• GSID HIV Data Browser
This HIV vaccine research program is generously funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
