AIDS Policy Project Urges Community Action to Push for More HIV Cure Funding

The AIDS Policy Project (APP), a recently formed activist group advocating for a cure for AIDS, is calling for community action to push politicians to fund research toward HIV eradication or a "functional cure" that can enable HIV positive people to remain healthy without antiretroviral therapy. APP recently issued a report stating that the National Institutes of Health devotes only about 3% of its budget for HIV cure research, but argues that it should be a top priority.

Below is the text of an APP fact sheet describing the group and its goals.

Help Us Push for a Cure for AIDS

The AIDS Policy Project, a new group of AIDS activists, launched a campaign for a cure for AIDS ten months ago. There have been important research break throughs in the last two years, so there is hope that a cure could be found soon (like in 5 to 10 years). But this is not a sure thing. Community action is needed to push politicians to fund the research and make sure that a cure for AIDS is a top priority at the National Institutes of Health in Washington, DC. We also want to help researchers cut through red tape, encourage them to work together and share information, find funding and other opportunities for scientists with new ideas, and get promising treatments that might lead to a cure out of labs and test tubes and test them in people, as soon as it is safe to do so.

The difference between an AIDS vaccine and a cure for AIDS.

Scientists are still trying to develop both an AIDS vaccine and an AIDS cure. They are two different things. A cure for AIDS would help people who already have the virus get well again and not need AIDS drugs anymore. An AIDS vaccine would help protect people who don’t yet have the virus. Like a measles vaccine, if an HIV-negative person took an AIDS vaccine, they would be protected from getting the virus. Both an AIDS vaccine and an AIDS cure are very important. But billions of dollars are already going into finding an AIDS vaccine that works (not much progress yet) and very little money goes into actually trying to find a cure for people who are already HIV-positive. The United States government (the National Institutes of Health) is the biggest financial supporter of the effort to find a cure for AIDS, but only $3 out of every $100 it spends on all AIDS research goes to actually finding a cure. A vaccine, if one is found, would not help people who already have HIV. A cure would mean that people with HIV would not have to take AIDS drugs any more—either their immune system would be able to control the virus (which is called a “functional cure,” or the virus would be eliminated completely from their body (this is called a “sterilizing cure.”)

One Little Problem: The NIH is underfunded. The National Institutes for Health (NIH) is the largest funder of AIDS cure research in the world. The NIH is a big institution, almost like a college, located outside Washington, DC in Bethesda, Maryland. It is a government agency, part of the US Department of Health and Human Services. The NIH does research in its laboratories in Bethesda, and also provides money for scientists who do research at universities all around the United States. For instance, the NIH funds AIDS cure research that takes place at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and at the University of California San Francisco.

But the NIH has received the same amount of money to do its work every year since 2003, and because of inflation it lost more than 13% of its annual spending power by 2009 due to prices going up and the amount of money they receive staying about the same. President Obama’s 2011 proposed budget would add only 3% to the overall NIH budget, which is peanuts.

Other problems: There is only enough money at the NIH to pay for 1 in 6 AIDS research projects when scientists apply for money. Overall, the NIH tends to spend money conservatively on traditional approachesand not on new ideas or on young researchers. There isn’t much opportunity for researchers from different labs to work together or share information, so the search for a cure goes slower than it should. Also, it is difficult for non-US researchers to get funding from the NIH. The NIH grant review panels prefer to fund US researchers.

Is there already a cure for AIDS? That is a trick question! There actually has been one person who has been cured of AIDS. But the treatment he received was so risky (although it worked out for him) that taking AIDS drugs for the rest of a person’s life is much safer. Here’s what happened. The man who was cured is known as “The Berlin Patient” because this all happened in Berlin, Germany.

The Berlin Patient is an American man of about 40 years old who lived in Berlin, had AIDS and also leukemia (blood cancer). His leukemia doctor needed to give him a bone marrow transplant to treat the leukemia. But he used a special person as a bone marrow donor--someone who was born with the "CCR5 deletion" (remember those initials) which means that the person cannot be infected with AIDS. About 1/1,000 Northern Europeans are born with this. The reason it protects you from AIDS is that you are born missing one of the puzzle pieces that HIV needs to infect your cells. (Technically, you are born missing the CCR5 “co-receptor.”)

It's been over three years. The Berlin Patient is alive and well and so far he is completely HIV free--not just with a zero viral load in his blood, but no HIV in his brain, stomach, etc. despite extensive and very sensitive testing—much more in-depth tests than people with AIDS receive from their doctors. Also, the bone marrow transplant knocked out the cancer, so he’s also cancer-free. The Berlin Patient’s treatment was very risky and expensive but also it was a major scientific breakthrough. It has lead to important new follow-up research. This case of the Berlin Patient was written up in the New England Journal of Medicine and the Wall Street Journal, and you can find the articles on the internet.

One interesting follow-up experiment to the Berlin Patient case is being conducted by Dr. Paula Cannon at the University of Southern California. She is using mice that have been given human immune systems. She then infects the mice with HIV. She takes out some of their t-cells, treats them with a new technology (called “zinc finger” technology) that removes the CCR5 receptors, puts the treated t-cells back into the mice and—NO MORE AIDS IN THE MICE. The advantage of this treatment is that because the t-cells come from the patient (mouse’s) own body originally, the whole thing is probably much safer than the Berlin Patient treatment. The next step is test this therapy in a very small group of people.

AIDS is not a chronic, manageable disease. AIDS drugs, though essential for life in the absence of a cure, are very hard on the bodies of people with HIV, causing problems ranging from liver cancer and heart attacks to early aging. Even these medications are only available to between 20% and 40% of people who need them around the world, and it is unlikely that most people with AIDS in developing countries will be able to get the AIDS drugs they will need for the rest of their lives. People with AIDS in Africa and other developing regions need and deserve a cure, and so do people in the US.

WE NEED YOU.

Sign up for email updates at JLIB_HTML_CLOAKING We will send you a free kit of information about how you can advocate for a cure for AIDS from your community or volunteer with us.

We’re holding a grassroots AIDS cure conference in December, 2010 in Philadelphia. Sign up at JLIB_HTML_CLOAKING and we’ll send you information about our conference.

We also need financial contributions to keep going. If you are interested in supporting this work, you can call us to make a contribution, mail us a check, or click on the DONATE button on our web page: www.AIDSPolicyProject.org.

10/8/10

Source

AIDS Policy Project. Help Us Push for a Cure. Fact sheet (undated).