“A Path to an HIV Vaccine”
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 efficacy 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 trials. The specimen repository currently houses over 300,000 tubes of serological material and the clinical database contains over 1.2 million pages of information.
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.
Recently, 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
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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)
GSID Consortium Members
• University of California, Santa Cruz
•
Monogram Biosciences
•
Genoma
•
PharmaStat
This HIV vaccine research program is generously funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
