Avac Event
On July 29, AVAC held a webinar Understanding the EMA Opinion: Next Steps for Dapivirine Vaginal Ring for advocates to learn about next steps on the regulatory process and implications for rollout from advocates, International Partnership for Microbicides (IPM) and the WHO. We were joined by Zeda Rosenberg, CEO of IPM, Rachel Baggaley from the WHO, Cleopatra Makura, 2019 AVAC Fellow, and Ruth Nahurira, a trial participant.
Recording and Slides: YouTube / Zeda Rosenberg’s Slides
Avac Event
Right now, COVID-19 is wreaking havoc on access to HIV treatment and prevention across the continent. In a matter of days, African countries will reach a grim milestone: the number of COVID-19 cases will surge past 1 million. Many clinics where adults and children get lifesaving HIV treatment have simply shuttered. Medicine supply chains have been disrupted, resulting in life-threatening shortages of drugs.
Activism is needed now to help ensure people living with HIV, tuberculosis and malaria in the world’s poorest countries do not face even greater suffering and death from the dual pandemics of COVID-19 and HIV. Join Health Gap‘s emergency activist organizing call on Tuesday, August 4th at 6PM EST.
Right now, Congress is negotiating an emergency COVID-19 spending package. We need to pressure them to fully fund an emergency response that will mitigate harm from COVID-19 to countries facing the highest burdens of HIV, tuberculosis and malaria.
Time is running out. in less than 7 days, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria will run out of money in its COVID-19 Emergency Response Mechanism, a program established to help countries respond to COVID-19 with testing, case finding and treatment while continuing to scale up AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria programs. And the US bilateral AIDS program, PEPFAR, is reporting destabilization of their treatment and prevention programs.
In order to stop millions of preventable deaths and avoid massive suffering from COVID-19 as well as HIV, tuberculosis and malaria, we need to demand $4 billion for The Global Fund and $1.4 billion for PEPFAR in the COVID-19 emergency supplemental bill before Congress now.
Avac Event
On Tuesday, August 25, AVAC held a webinar presentation and discussion with Dr. Barney Graham, the Deputy Director of the NIH’s Vaccine Research Center (VRC). Dr. Graham reviewed the rapid development timeline for COVID-19 vaccines and explored some of the recent and historic vaccine research developments that are being applied to this challenge. He also provided a specific update on the mRNA-1273 vaccine—a vaccine developed by Moderna and the NIH—which is undergoing testing in a Phase III clinical trial launched last month.
Recording and Slides: YouTube / Dr. Graham’s Slides
Avac Event
On Wednesday, September 16, WACI Health, AVAC, and Friends of the Global Fight Against AIDS, TB and Malaria hosted a virtual dialogue about the impact of COVID-19 in Africa. Panelists included Dr. John Nkengasong, Director of the Africa Centres for Disease Control, Rosemary Mburu, Executive Director of WACI Health and Lwazi Mlaba, a Global Fund Champion working in HIV, TB and GBV; a COVID-survivor and the founder of the an African COVID-19 Support group. Dr. Elizabeth Bukusi, Principal Research Officer at KEMRI and Co-Director of the KEMRI-UCSF Infectious Disease Research Training Program and AVAC’s Maureen Luba moderated the converstation. The conversation explored:
Avac Event
With multiple COVID vaccine candidates in late-stage trials, the growing politicization of the process, and, especially the growing concerns and mistrust, now is a particularly important time to engage in the regulatory process. Detailed guidance for COVID vaccine developers, issued by US FDA in June, provides a roadmap for advocates to monitor and evaluate the vaccine approval process, and AVAC recently put out this primer on the process, highlighting the upcoming VRBPAC meeting on October 22.
Please join AVAC and TAG on Wednesday, Sept 30th at 5pm ET for a strategy call to prepare for the October 22 FDA Vaccine Advisory Committee meeting. Access the call here.
We’ll be joined by Josh Sharfstein – now at Johns Hopkins and a former Principal Deputy Commissioner of the FDA – who will walk is through the FDA process, engage in discussion about how best to engage with the VRBPAC process, and provide thoughts on what we all might prioritize and highlight. Written submissions to the FDA are due on Oct 15 and requests to present at the meeting are due on Oct 7.
Avac Event
The HIV Prevention Trials Network (HPTN) hosted a community webinar to discuss the primary results of HPTN 084, a randomized, double-blind controlled trial designed to evaluate the efficacy and safety of long-acting injectable cabotegravir (CAB LA) to prevent the sexual acquisition of HIV in cisgender women in sub-Saharan Africa.
Avac Event
On Tuesday, December 8 at 11am ET, the International AIDS Society’s Towards an HIV Cure initiative is hosting a webinar, Paving the way for an HIV cure: Introducing Target Product Profiles (TPP) and the HIV Cure Africa Acceleration Partnership (HCAAP), to unpack two new articles just published in The Lancet HIV.
The articles argue why now is the time to focus on advancing HIV cure research. Outputs of a 2019 meeting of global stakeholders, these articles—The case for an HIV cure and how to get there and Multi Stakeholder Consensus on a Target Product Profile for an HIV Cure—make the case for the role an HIV cure can play in ending the epidemic, and share a roadmap to get there, including the role of community advocates.
As described in the articles and to be discussed on next week’s webinar, there is a need now for community advocates to provide input on acceptability of potential cure interventions, help to shape the policy environment, and enhance the capacity needed for cure trials, such as robust HIV and viral load testing. To that end, the proposed HCAAP plans to coordinate key stakeholders (e.g., regulators, funders, civil society, Ministries Of Health, researchers, etc.) across the public and private sectors to drive the development of a community-led cure research agenda and speed up access to a potential strategy in the future.
Avac Event
HIV Research for Prevention Conference (R4P) Virtual took place on January 27-28 and February 3-4.
Recorded sessions from the Advocates’ Corner brought advocates, researchers and allies together to debrief on key findings and discussions from R4P Virtual 2021. Check out the full schedule here.
Continue these conversations on engage.avac.org!
This collection of satellites, symposia and oral abstract sessions includes AVAC team members and partners confronting key issues on the frontier of HIV prevention science in 2021.
Wednesday, January 27
Thursday, January 28
Wednesday, February 3
Thursday, February 4
Many of the team and partners are also representing AVAC, CASPR and the Prevention Market Manager in posters and publications—click here and scroll to the last page for a full list.
To make the most of the sessions above, AVAC has a host of resources for you:
On February 2, IAS hosted a one-day conference on COVID-19 prevention. It featured prevention-related science, policy and practice, along with discussions and presentations on how to address the growing gap in access to approved vaccines. Sessions of particular interest included:
And open to all was Working within the Global Infrastructure on COVID-19: A Conversation with members of the CAAB (Advocates’ Corner), a discussion on how the world rapidly pivoted to COVID-19 research and what that meant for stakeholder engagement.
Avac Event
The annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) took place virtually from March 6-10, 2021. The goal of the conference was to provide a forum for researchers to translate their laboratory and clinical findings into tangible progress against the HIV pandemic.
Read “The Personal is Planetary: CROI and COVID one year on”.
CROI’s Community Liaison Subcommittee (CLS), in collaboration with a range of global partners, organized Daily Community Research Updates, held each day before official CROI conference sessions started. These updates provided an intimate setting for attendees joining from different time-zones (breakfast or margarita time), in which advocates had the opportunity to ask questions directly to researchers and engage in dialogue. The focus for each day varied, but the schedule was designed to cover key HIV research topics with special attention to any major developments presented at CROI.
Speaker: Gregg Gonsalves (US)
Moderator: Jim Pickett (AIDS Foundation Chicago)
Date: Sunday March 7
View the recording.
Speakers: Richard Jefferys (TAG, US) and Katie Bar (Penn Univ)
Moderators: Alain Volny-Anne (EATG), Danielle Campbell (ACTG)
Date: Monday March 8
View the recording.
Speaker: Marina Fernandes de Barros Caskey (Rockefeller Univ and Sergipe Univ), Discussion – Plenary Speaker
Moderators: Ntando Yola (APHA) and Stacey Hannah (AVAC)
Date: Tuesday March 9
View the recording.
Speakers: Randolph Matthews (MSD), Raphael Landovitz (HPTN) and Linda-Gail Bekker (Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation)
Moderator: Deirdre Grant (AVAC) and Joyce Ng’ang’a (WACI Health)
Date: Wednesday March 10, 8:30 AM Eastern – 9:45 AM Eastern
View the recording.
View the conference agenda and the schedule-at-a-glance.
In response to community requests, full and free access to all Virtual CROI 2021 session recordings will be provided via the CROI website on April 15, 2021. The conference abstracts and the opening Martin Delaney Presentation have been available since the conference week and remain available at croiconference.org. For full details on this policy shift, read more.
Avac Event
The fifth annual Biomedical HIV Prevention Summit will be held March 30-31, 2021 as a virtual conference. The format and focus is similar to the in-person Summit convened in years past. It involves highlighting the role that biomedical prevention tools such as PrEP, PEP, Treatment as Prevention (TasP), and U=U have in ending the epidemic. The goal of the conference is to bring the leaders from the various target communities together with the staff responsible for Ending the HIV Epidemic program implementation. The Summit will feature two days filled with over 40 workshop sessions, four plenary sessions, several community corners, an exhibit hall as well as on-line networking opportunities via virtual lounges.