HIV and AIDS

I blogged once before about AIDS and HIV. To go along with Heather's first post and second post, I found an article on MSNBC and thought I'd comment on it. I have had a few friends from my past, while living in Vancouver that either had HIV, or died from AIDS, and I've seen what it can do. Gary, a great guy living in Seattle, was skinnier than one could ever imagine. The last time I visited him, about 2 weeks before he died, he was hardly able to walk, not able to eat, and the bacteria in his mouth made it hard for him to swallow. It was painful to see, never mind live through. I couldn't even imagine what it would feel like to know you were going to die any day.So I was looking through my feeds today and ran across this article. I think, from what I read, that the hope for a vaccine is there, but the answers Larry Corey gives throughout the article don't instill any sense of confidence in the fact that they are any closer to a cure than they were 10 or 15 years ago. The little glimmer of hope comes from his answer when questioned on where they stand in development.

In the last few years, we've developed vaccines that we think are getting the magnitude and the breadth (or the diversity of T cell responses) that was achieved with other successful vaccines like the small pox vaccine. We have started to embark on a series of efficacy trials to see if these vaccines will work. That is where the field is.

I'm not quite sure how close that is, as he doesn't say, but eventually they solved the small pox problem, right?The part of this whole thing that really puzzles me is what's discussed next. Mr. Corey talks about the implications of letting the private sector take on the huge task of finding a vaccine almost 20 years ago. You see, the problem, he says, is that all vaccines are only worth about $8,000,000,000 (yes, that's billion) worldwide. The drug companies don't really want to pursue a market with a puny income potential as that. If it costs them a few hundred million, or even a billion dollars, to develop the vaccine, their only looking at profits of $7 billion, which just isn't enough.In the U.S., the total market for Lipitor, which is a cholesterol drug, is $8 billion. That's just for the United States. There's the whole world out there wanting this drug. Hey, the Lipitor people take my $100 a month, and I'm just one person.So to develop a wonder drug like Lipitor, any statin, or something similar, the drug companies stand to gain profits ten times what an AIDS vaccine will bring in. It's a sad world we live in when $7,000,000,000 in profit just isn't enough to save 52 million lives.So what does this all mean? Well, the smaller private companies and public companies are going to have to take over. People who are looking to find a cure for just that reason, are able to live on what grant money they get, and aren't out looking for their own billion dollars.The only great thing said is his last quote:

It depends on what the data show. I can't give those promises. We'll know at the end of 2007 whether the approach [used in the Merck and the Vaccine Research Center vaccines] does something. Even if it's a modest amount, we'll know which fork to take so we can improve upon it in a much more goal-directed way. These are very important trials. We designed the trial on purpose to get as quick a read-out as we could to tell us what to do next. If we get great results, we'll design trials for licensure. If it's lesser results, then we'll build upon that and we'll develop a better vaccine.

It's hopeful, but not hopeful enough. If the results from the studies using the current vaccines aren't good enough then it's back to the drawing board. Sure, they've learned a lot up to this point, and it's not all wasted time, but how many more millions of people are going to die in the meantime? Maybe, if G.W. didn't spend all that money getting his oil, he could've put it towards research and university education. Then maybe we wouldn't have to worry about this pandemic anymore.

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