Prevention, Treatment and Human Rights

AVAC Executive Director Mitchell Warren and international gay rights activist Bisi Alimi dig into the tough realities of fighting HIV in 2016 in this interview, originally livestreamed from the AIDS 2016 conference in Durban.

Alimi asks Warren to make sense of scientific advances and new discoveries that are answering big questions and raising others. And Warren shows the imperative connection between prevention, treatment and human rights. Click to view.

Ighodaro spars with Bisi over some provocative questions about the role of Africa’s activists and an agenda for the future. View the video here.

Biomedical Prevention in 2016 – At a Glance

A snapshot of prevention strategies underway or under development from 2015-2020. Excerpted from AVAC Report 2016: Big Data, Real People.

HIV Prevention Research Status Report

A survey of prevention strategies and the status of their safety and efficacy. Excerpted from AVAC Report 2016: Big Data, Real People.

New! AVAC Report 2016 Big Data, Real People: The annual state of prevention advocacy

If you’re packing for Durban, we hope you’ll pause right now and add to your bag AVAC’s annual state of the field, Big Data Real People. The full PDF, Executive Summary and graphics are available here.

As always, AVAC Report is our annual advocacy analysis, with an agenda that spans the next 12 months—and beyond. We’ve designed it be a clear, succinct, actionable statement of the strengths and weakness of HIV prevention data today—and we hope you’ll join us in amplifying these messages at next week’s gathering.

Even if you’re not heading to Durban, we hope that this year’s Report will top your packing list for the journey through the next 12 months of advocacy and action.

In the Report, we argue that the state of HIV prevention data collection in 2016 is poor. One part of the solution lies in the adoption of “HIV Prevention Data Dashboards”. This tracking tool could bring the same specificity and accountability to non-ART prevention services that the “treatment cascade” of diagnosis, initiation, retention and virologic suppression does for antiretrovirals for people living with HIV.

The world cannot even pretend that ending AIDS is possible without action on non-ART prevention. We need to roll out what we have, continue R&D on what we still need, as well as scale up ART for all people living with HIV. That’s what the new UNAIDS Prevention Gap report says. That’s what AVAC has said for years. That’s what we hope you’ll say in Durban and over the coming year.

Here’s the Report, a roadmap for the coming year. Please read it, join us on the journey, let us know what you think!

Press Release

Data gaps hinder global efforts to reduce HIV infections, AVAC report warns; improved data collection and reporting needed to meet looming global AIDS targets

Contacts

Mitchell Warren, mitchell@avac.org, +1-914-661-1536
Kay Marshall, kay@avac.org, +1-347-249-6375

In a report issued today, AVAC warned that major gaps in global HIV/AIDS data stand in the way of delivering HIV prevention advances to millions of people who need them most. The report identifies several critical weaknesses of today’s HIV prevention data collection and monitoring systems and offers a concrete roadmap for closing these gaps. The report, Big Data, Real People, was issued ahead of next week’s International AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa (July 18-22), where advocates will demand action to speed HIV prevention research and delivery.

“In an era in which big data are expected to improve essentially every part of our lives, there’s no excuse for HIV prevention data systems to be so uneven, incomplete and inefficient,” said Mitchell Warren, AVAC’s executive director. “To have any chance of ending the epidemic by 2030, we need to be collecting and accounting for every bit of useful information from every person living with or at risk for HIV.”

The need for improved HIV prevention data systems is particularly pressing given the UNAIDS “fast-track” goal to reduce new annual diagnoses to no more than 500,000 by 2020. Earlier this month, UNAIDS reported that the number of new HIV infections has remained near 2 million per year for the past decade.

Report identifies specific HIV data gaps, recommends solutions

AVAC’s report focuses on four critical data gaps that must be addressed to effectively prioritize, target and measure the impact of efforts to develop and deliver HIV prevention advances.

Specifically, today’s HIV prevention data are:

  • Not sufficiently broken down by age, gender, income status, key population status and other vital categories
  • Missing or incomplete for key populations most in need of prevention, including adolescent girls and young women, men who have sex with men, transgender women, and others
  • Not tied to useful HIV prevention metrics and indicators, so that it is impossible to know whether prevention programs are actually averting infections and improving health
  • Not effectively informing the HIV prevention research agenda

To overcome these weaknesses, the report outlines three critical strategies that should be pursued most urgently:

1. Standardize and systemize data collection and reporting for HIV prevention

Understand, measure and report on the risk level of people testing HIV-negative; create and measure linkages to evidence-based prevention for people at substantial risk; and use a standardized “Prevention Data Dashboard” to continually evaluate progress. Such dashboards would consolidate and arrange available data to illuminate critical prevention gaps and help the global community, governments and funders better conceptualize their HIV prevention programming and evaluation. AVAC’s report provides a model dashboard for decision-makers to adopt.

2. Improve use of data for adolescent girls and young women

Ensure that a growing volume of available data can be applied in a meaningful way. As a first step, funders, implementers and governments need to do a better job of defining and segmenting this population; map who is investing in what and where; put adolescent girls and young women in control of core aspects of the data-collection enterprise; and adopt gender-specific indicators tailored to girls and women.

3. Put research on the “fast-track” and countries at the center

Fit biomedical HIV prevention research into comprehensive prevention plans tied to national targets for incidence reduction. Countries and research institutions must invest time and resources in stakeholder engagement; ensure that research priorities are informed by epidemiological and other quality HIV data; and develop national research plans for meeting the prevention needs of specific, affected populations.

The new report and related resources, including downloadable graphics, are available now at www.avac.org/report2016.

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About AVAC: Founded in 1995, AVAC is a non-profit organization that uses education, policy analysis, advocacy and a network of global collaborations to accelerate the ethical development and global delivery of AIDS vaccines, male circumcision, microbicides, PrEP and other emerging HIV prevention options as part of a comprehensive response to the pandemic.

What Should the Next US President Do? Advice for Hillary and Donald.

On behalf of IFARA, thebodypro.com recently posted two videos. In the first, Jim Pickett, director of Prevention Advocacy and Gay Men’s Health at the AIDS Foundation of Chicago, spoke with Robert Grant, MD, MPH, Mike Cohen, MD, Ian McGowan, MD, PhD, FRCP, and Mitchell Warren about HIV prevention research presented at this year’s Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI).

New prevention tools, such as a safe and effective vaginal ring and the prospect of long-acting injectable agents are exciting news, panelists agreed. However, these tools are only as good as their implementation — as is the case with already approved methods, such as oral pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). This includes finding and effectively treating people living with HIV, because those with an undetectable viral load do not transmit the virus.

Panelists would advise the next US President to invest in long-term research, including the search for a vaccine, cure, fund open-label studies of the vaginal ring, and provide treatment and prevention services to as many people as possible — especially women and men of color.

Watch the video on thebodypro.com.

In the second video, AVAC Policy Director Kevin Fisher spoke with Steven Wakefield and Ntando Yola about the development of a vaccine for HIV.

Wakefield called antibody-mediated prevention “the next holy grail.” Trials of broadly neutralizing antibodies that are infused every two months will start enrollment across the globe by mid-year, he said. However, a potential vaccine is just one component in a set of HIV prevention methods. Yola described HIV prevention as “a track field where products are racing each other.” Communities pin their hopes on each new prevention modality, but the focus needs to be moved from specific methods to overall prevention science, he believes. To that end, the science behind vaccine research needs to be explained in a way that people in the community can understand.

This video is also available at thebodypro.com.

Progress Toward an Vaccines

This one-page infographic from NIAID highlights challenges and progress in the search for a vaccines, and also includes brief descriptions of some of the approaches to vaccine development that scientists are exploring today.

Vaccines Clinical Trials Snapshot

Excerpted from our quick, colorful and comprehensive vaccines research four-pager, the centerspread tracks the current status and future possibilities of all potential vaccines approaches being test. The centerspread also has a list of what advocates’ should be on the lookout for.

bNAb Targets on HIV

Scientists have mapped the shape and structure of bNAbs and identified points of contact and binding with the envelope trimer, shown in this graphic. Understanding the shape of the binding sites for bNAbs is key to vaccine development.

The Number of Vaccines Trials (2016)

We know that an AIDS vaccine is possible and that a vaccine will be an important part of a long-term strategy to end the AIDS epidemic. The road ahead is long, but clinical trials—even those with disappointing results—and early-stage research provide critical clues to the way forward.