The Three Zeros of Eliminating HIV / AIDS: Global Science and Policy

Speakers

Organizers

Jerome Kim, MD

Walter Reed Army Institute of Research

Jerome H. Kim, MD, is currently Principal Deputy and Chief, Laboratory of Molecular Virology and Pathogenesis at MHRP. He also serves as the Project Manager for the HIV Vaccines and Advanced Concepts Evaluation Project Management Offices, U.S. Army Medical Materiel Development Activity, Fort Detrick, MD. Dr. Kim, a Colonel in the United States Army Medical Corps, started his military career in the Air Force, assigned to the Department of Retroviral Research, WRAIR. After a brief exodus, he entered Army service in 2000 in the Department of HIV Vaccine Research, Division of Retrovirology, WRAIR. Prior to serving as the Principal Deputy, MHRP, Dr. Kim was the Chief, Department of Retrovirology, U.S. Army Medical Component, Armed Forces Research Institute of Medical Sciences, Bangkok, Thailand (2004-2008). He has also been the Chief, Biomedical Research Service, Tripler Army Medical Center (2002-2004) and Assistant Chief, Department of HIV Vaccine Development, MHRP (2000-2002). He has been deployed to Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. Dr. Kim’s research interests include HIV molecular epidemiology, host genetics, and HIV vaccine development. He serves as a reviewer for scientific journals and has served on consultations for the World Health Organization and the Global HIV/AIDS Vaccine Enterprise. Dr. Kim is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences and is a Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine at the John A. Burns School of Medicine, University of Hawaii. He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a Fellow of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. Military honors include the Army Commendation Medal with one oak-leaf cluster (OLC), the Air Force/Army Meritorious Service Medal with 4 OLC, the “A” designator and the Order of Military Medical Merit. Dr. Kim graduated Phi Beta Kappa with highest honors in Biology and high honors in History from the University of Hawaii, Manoa in 1980, where he won the Library Prize for Pacific Islands Area Research and the Arthur Lyman Dean Prize in the Humanities. He graduated from the Yale University School of Medicine in 1984. Dr. Kim completed his training in Internal Medicine (1987) and fellowship in Infectious Diseases (1990) at Duke University Medical Center and was elected into Alpha Omega Alpha while at Duke.

Yegor Voronin, PhD

Global HIV Vaccine Enterprise

Yegor Voronin, PhD, is a Senior Science Officer at the Secretariat of the Global HIV Vaccine Enterprise, an alliance of organizations dedicated to accelerating the development of preventive HIV vaccines. He oversees the Timely Topics in HIV Vaccines program, which brings experts together to identify and address the most pressing strategic needs of HIV vaccine research and development. Dr. Voronin has spent nearly 15 years in HIV research. He began his work in Dr. Vinay Pathak’s laboratory at West Virginia University and at the National Cancer Institute in Frederick, MD studying the molecular details of the reverse transcription process. He then moved on to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle where he studied population genetics and mechanisms of evolution of HIV in the laboratories of Drs. Michael Emerman and Julie Overbaugh. Dr. Voronin holds a master’s degree in Molecular Biology from the Novosibirsk State University in Russia and a PhD in Biochemistry from the West Virginia University.

Jennifer Henry, PhD

The New York Academy of Sciences

Speakers

Myron S. Cohen, MD

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Myron S. Cohen is the J. Herbert Bate Distinguished Professor of Medicine, Microbiology and Immunology and Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Cohen received his BS degree from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana and an MD degree from Rush Medical College. He completed Internal Medicine Training at the University of Michigan, and an Infectious Disease Fellowship at Yale University. Dr. Cohen is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine. He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and the Infectious Disease Society of America, and a member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation and the American Association of Physicians. Dr. Cohen serves as the Director of the UNC Division of Infectious Disease and the UNC Institute for Global Health and Infectious Disease, and Associate Vice Chancellor for Global Health. Dr. Cohen serves as Co-PI of the NIH HIV Prevention Trials Network (HPTN). Dr. Cohen received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from Rush Medical College in 2000. He received the Thomas Parran Award (2005) for lifetime achievement in STD research from the American Sexually Transmitted Diseases Association. In 2008 Dr. Cohen received the O. Max Gardner Award, the highest honor in the University of North Carolina 16 campus system. Dr. Cohen been recognized for more than a decade as one of America’s “Top Doctors” and “Best Doctors”. Dr. Cohen’s research work focuses on the transmission and prevention of transmission of HIV. Dr. Cohen helped to develop laboratory methods to measure HIV in genital secretions, as well as methods to detect the best antiviral agents to reduce replication of HIV in these compartments. For this work Dr. Cohen has received 30 years of continuous funding from the National Institutes of Health, including an NIH MERIT Award. Dr. Cohen is the architect and Principal Investigator of the multinational HPTN 052 trial, which demonstrated that antiretroviral treatment prevents the sexual transmission of HIV-1. This work was recognized by Science Magazine as the “Breakthrough of the Year” in 2011. Dr. Cohen is the author of more than 500 publications. He has written extensively about the prevention of HIV infection. Much of Dr. Cohen’s research has been conducted in resource constrained countries, especially in Malawi and in the People’s Republic of China.

For more information contact Lisa Chensvold, Director of Communications, UNC Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases: globalhealth.unc.edu.

Michele R. Decker, ScD, MPH

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

Michele R. Decker, ScD, MPH, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health, at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health where she also directs the Women’s Health program of the Center for Public Health and Human Rights. A social epidemiologist by training, her research focuses on gender based violence, i.e., sexual assault, intimate partner violence, and sex trafficking, and their implications for HIV and other aspects of sexual and reproductive health. Much of this research focuses on marginalized populations including urban women, adolescents and those involved in transactional sex or sex work. She is currently involved in developing and testing clinic-based intervention efforts to mitigate the health consequences of violence, as well as primary mixed-methods research to understand the mechanisms by which violence influences sexual health and HIV risk. She works domestically as well as internationally in South/Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe/Central Asia. She has contributed to over 75 peer reviewed articles on these topics as well as consultations with the World Health Organization, UNFPA and the World Bank.

Luiz Loures, MD, MPH

UNAIDS

Dr Luiz Loures, Deputy Executive Director of Programme of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations

Dr Luiz Loures joined UNAIDS in 1996 and was appointed Deputy Executive Director of Programme and Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations in January 2013. He leads UNAIDS’ efforts in leveraging critical support to countries to meet 2015 global AIDS targets and establish a sustainable response to AIDS. Dr Loures is a medical doctor with nearly 30 years of experience in the AIDS response. His engagement ranges from providing medical care to people living with HIV in the early days of the epidemic, to his dynamic involvement in global policy framework development. Born, raised and educated in Brazil, Dr Loures completed his medical studies at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, specializing in critical care. He holds an MPH degree from the University of California at Berkeley.

Mary A. Marovich, MD

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NIH

Dr. Mary Anne Marovich joins NIAID’s Division of AIDS as the new director of the Vaccine Research Program, where she will lead the development and coordination of clinical and preclinical research on HIV vaccines. Marovich comes to NIH from the U.S. Military HIV Research Program, where she served as chief of vaccine research and development since 2005. In that position, she led, directed and developed a global HIV vaccine research program. Additionally, Marovich worked as the clinic director for MHRP’s Rockville Vaccine Assessment Center where she lead and directed multiple early-stage HIV and non-HIV vaccine clinical trials. Further, she served as chair of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research Institutional Review Board. Marovich earned bachelor’s degrees in biochemistry and chemistry at Illinois State University and a medical degree at Loyola University of Chicago-Maywood. In 1993, she completed a residency in internal medicine and clinical infectious disease training at the University of Colorado and earned a diploma in tropical medicine and hygiene from the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons, London School of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. Marovich worked in NIAID’s Laboratory of Parasitic Diseases as a clinical fellow from 1995-1998 and as a clinical associate from 1998-99 while she completed her infectious disease fellowship. An associate professor of medicine with the Uniformed Services University’s Department of Medicine, Marovich has won several honors for academic and teaching excellence. Additionally, she serves on a number of technical panels and as a scientific journal reviewer. She is a member of the American Association of Immunology, the American Society of Tropical Medicine and a Fellow of the American College of Physicians.

Nelson L. Michael, MD, PhD

Walter Reed Army Institute of Research

Nelson L. Michael, MD, PhD is the Director of the U.S. Military HIV Research Program (MHRP) at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, an international HIV vaccine research program that successfully integrates HIV/AIDS prevention, care and treatment. Dr. Michael’s career has focused on developing an effective HIV vaccine to protect U.S. and Allied Armed Services and reduce the global impact of the disease. MHRP’s international research program has seven research centers in the U.S., Africa and Asia, where it conducts HIV discovery research, cohort studies, vaccine trials and therapeutic investigation. Dr. Michael guided MHRP through the completion of the RV144 HIV vaccine study in Thailand, which provided the world’s first demonstration that a preventive HIV vaccine was possible and subsequently elucidated correlates of risk of infection and sieve effects. More recently, Dr. Michael helped lead a study on a new vaccine regimen that partially protected monkeys from HIV-like infection. This research also identified factors associated with HIV prevention and control, and identified new HIV vaccine candidates to test in human clinical trials for both prevention and therapeutic applications.

Julio Montaner, MD

BC Centre for Excellence in HIV / AIDS

Dr. Julio Montaner is originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is currently Professor and Head of the Division of AIDS in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia (UBC). He is also the UBC and St. Paul’s Hospital Foundation Chair in AIDS Research, as well as the Director of the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS. He was the President of the International AIDS Society from 2008-2010. He played a key role in establishing the efficacy of NNRTI based highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) and more recently, played a key role in establishing the efficacy of HAART treatment as prevention with financial support of the BC Ministry of Health, an Avant Garde Award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse in the US, as well as the Canadian Institute for Health Research. Dr. Montaner has authored over 550 scientific publications on HIV/AIDS. His current research interests include HAART as prevention, optimal use of HAART, salvage therapy, new antiretrovirals, as well as hard to reach populations, treatment as prevention of viral hepatitis and addiction management, including harm reduction strategies. In 2008, he was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada. In 2010, he received an Honorary Doctor of Science from Simon Fraser University, the Prix Galien, the Order of BC, as well as the Albert Einstein World Science Award. In 2012, he was the recipient of the Grand Decoration of Honor for Services to Austria, the Hope is a Vaccine Award from the Global Alliance to Immunize against AIDS, and The Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal for his contributions to the field of HIV/AIDS.

John P. Moore, PhD

Weill Cornell Medical College

He is a tenured Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. He received his BA, MA, MPhil and PhD degrees from Cambridge University, UK.  From 1982 to 1992, he worked there, at the University of Glasgow, and the Chester Beatty Laboratories, London. He moved to the USA in 1992, joining the Medical College in 2000. He was an Elizabeth Glaser Scientist of the Pediatric AIDS Foundation and has held an Unrestricted Grant for Infectious Disease Research from the Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation. He holds a Merit Award from NIAID. He is an Editorial Board member for several journals, and has served on study sections and committees for NIH and charities. He directs projects on HIV-1 entry into cells and how to inhibit it with specific drug candidates and antibodies; designing envelope glycoprotein trimers for neutralizing antibody induction and structural studies; and understanding HIV-1 resistance under selection by CCR5 inhibitors.

Robert R. Redfield, MD

University of Maryland School of Medicine

Dr. Robert R. Redfield has been actively engaged in clinical research and clinical care of chronic human viral infections and infectious diseases, especially HIV, for more than 30 years. Dr. Redfield is a graduate of Georgetown University School of Medicine and completed his internal medicine and infectious diseases training at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Walter Army Institute of Research. He served as the founding director of the Department of Retroviral Research within the Military’s HIV Research Program and retired after 20 years of service in the US Army Medical Corp when he co-founded the University of Maryland’s Institute of Human Virology. He is currently a Professor of Medicine, Professor of Microbiology and Immunology, and serves as the IHV Associate Director and Director of the Division of Clinical Care and Research, as well as the Chief of Infectious Diseases within the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Dr. Redfield made several important early contributions to our understanding of HIV, to include the demonstration of the importance of heterosexual transmission and the development of the Walter Reed staging system for HIV infection. His dominant area of research interest is focused the development of novel biological approaches to the treatment of chronic viral pathogens with a particular focus on targeting host cell pathways and host directed immunity for their therapeutic potential. Presently, Dr. Redfield oversees an extensive clinical program providing HIV care and treatment to more than 5,000 patients in the Baltimore/Washington DC community. He also leads extensive USG funded global care and treatment, and post-graduate medical education programs, which are currently active in 5 African and 2 Caribbean countries.

Bill Snow

Global HIV Vaccine Enterprise

Mr. William (Bill) Snow is a Director of the Global HIV Vaccine Enterprise, an alliance of organizations dedicated to accelerating the development of preventive HIV vaccines. Bill oversees a Secretariat who helps to facilitate coordination, collaboration, knowledge sharing and resource optimization in the HIV vaccine field. Bill has a long and distinguished history in the HIV vaccine field, advising on and advocating for funding, legislation and a wide variety of activities to help accelerate development of a safe, effective and affordable AIDS vaccine for more than 20 years. He is a co-founder and long-time Board member of AVAC: Global Advocacy for HIV Prevention, and was a member of the Coordinating Committee and Board of the Enterprise when it received its initial funding in 2005. Bill was instrumental in establishing national, local and global community-advisory boards at the NIH clinical trial networks AVEG, HIVNET and HVTN and today sits on the NIAID AIDS Vaccine Research Subcommittee, the NIH Vaccine Research Center Scientific Advisory Working Group and has at times served in the leadership groups of every HIV vaccine clinical trials group to date.

Magdalena Sobieszczyk, MD, MPH

Columbia University Medical Center

Dr. Magdalena Sobieszczyk is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Medicine in the Infectious Diseases Division at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. She is an investigator in the National Institutes of Health sponsored HIV Vaccine Trials Network (HVTN), a multicenter organization whose mission is to develop an effective preventive HIV vaccine, and an investigator in the AIDS Clinical Trials Group. She is the Associate Director of the NYC HIV Vaccine Unit and her research focuses on developing, testing, and implementing biomedical strategies to prevent HIV. She has been involved in development and implementation of several national and international HIV vaccine protocols including serving as the co-chair of HVTN 505, a phase 2b protocol evaluating the efficacy and safety of VRC’s DNA prime/rAd5 boost vaccine regimen. Dr. Sobieszczyk is also the protocol chair of HVTN 802, a longitudinal observational study to evaluate the virologic, immunologic, and clinical course of HIV infection in persons who participated in advanced phase HIV vaccine trials. Dr. Sobieszczyk completed her Internal Medicine residency and fellowship in Infectious Diseases at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and holds an MPH degree from the Mailman School of Public Health.

Annie Sparrow, MD, MPH

Mount Sinai Global Health

Dr. Annie Sparrow, MD, MRCP, FRACP, MPH is Assistant Professor and Deputy Director of the Human Rights Program in the Department of Global Health, teaching human rights and humanitarian aid in complex emergencies. An Australian, Dr. Sparrow spent her first ten postgraduate years practicing pediatric intensive care in London and her native Perth. She began focusing more on public health after a brief stint in Afghanistan under Taliban control. She served as a lead public advocate for refugees detained in punitive conditions in Australia and worked in remote Aboriginal communities before obtaining a Masters in Public Health at Harvard. She then joined Human Rights Watch, focusing on HIV and sexual violence in conflict and working mainly in Sudan and Chad. On one trip to Darfur, she gave displaced children crayons and paper, which they used to draw pictures about the atrocities they had witnessed and escaped. These pictures became the much-acclaimed “Darfur Drawings” exhibit that traveled widely and was used by the International Criminal Court as evidence of systematic war crimes by the Sudanese government. Most recently, Dr. Sparrow spent several years based in Nairobi working in various complex humanitarian emergencies (Sudan, Timor Leste, Somalia, Zimbabwe) for the Emergency Response Team of Catholic Relief Services and a further year as director of UNICEF’s malaria program in Somalia for the Global Fund against Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

Panelists

Chris Collins

amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research

Chris Collins is Vice President and Director of Public Policy at amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research, where he leads the organization’s policy analysis and advocacy efforts. Collins also oversees amfAR’s GMT Initiative, a global grantmaking program. Before joining amfAR, Collins was a policy and communications consultant for numerous domestic and global health organizations. In 2007 he authored Improving Outcomes: Blueprint for a National AIDS Plan for the United States, which helped catalyze the movement for the first comprehensive U.S. National HIV/AIDS Strategy. He then helped organize advocacy for development and design of the Strategy. As a consultant to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Collins coordinated the work of the Global HIV Prevention Working Group. He also oversaw production of the Missing the Target report series on international AIDS service scale-up, produced by the International Treatment Preparedness Coalition (ITPC). Collins is a co-founder of the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition (AVAC), served as its executive director for two years, and remains on its board. As Appropriations Associate for Rep. Nancy Pelosi in the late 1990s, Collins developed the first Congressional legislation designed to provide incentives for the development and delivery of vaccines against AIDS, malaria, and TB. He is the author of dozens of publications on health policy. Collins holds a Master’s Degree in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Tim Horn

Treatment Action Group

Tim Horn is the HIV Project Director at the Treatment Action Group (TAG), a New York-based independent research and policy think tank fighting for better treatment, a vaccine, and a cure for AIDS. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of AIDSmeds.com, an educational portal for people living with HIV/AIDS, and Executive Editor of The PRN Notebook, a quarterly journal for HIV-treating clinicians. He has also worked for the Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR), the AIDS Treatment Data Network and the PWA Health Group. He has been living with HIV since 1992.

Rick King, PhD

International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI)

Rick King is the Vice President of Vaccine Design, overseeing a comprehensive AIDS vaccine discovery program that includes an AIDS Vaccine Design & Development Laboratory in Brooklyn, the Neutralizing Antibody Center at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California and a New Translational Research laboratory in Delhi India. King received his PhD in Biochemistry from Johns Hopkins University and conducted postdoctoral research at the National Cancer Institute’s Laboratory of Cellular Molecular Biology where he discovered a molecular abnormality that occurs with certain breast cancers. King has worked as an Associate Professor in the Lombardi Cancer Research Center’s Department of Biochemistry, and as the Senior Vice President of Research at GenVec, Inc. At GenVec, he led the company’s efforts in the identification, selection and advancement of products for cancer, ocular and infectious disease applications, leading to therapeutics currently in clinical trials. King has been the author and recipient of many peer reviewed grants, is an inventor on 12 issued patents, and has published more than 80 peer-reviewed publications.

Daniel Tietz, RN, JD

AIDS Community Research Initiative of America (ACRIA)

Daniel Tietz has served as Executive Director of the AIDS Community Research Initiative of America (ACRIA) since March 2006. In his tenure, Tietz doubled ACRIA’s budget and vastly expanded its research activities, as well as its educational, materials development, and evaluation consulting services. He hasalso ensured that ACRIA is committed to furthering sensible, science-based public policy, and actively advocates for the resources necessary to bring an end to the AIDS epidemic in the U.S. and around the world. With the creation of the ACRIA Center on HIV & Aging, Tietz has guided the organization to become an international leader in research on and responses to the needs of older adults with and at risk for HIV. Following the 2006 release of its groundbreaking Research on Older Adults with HIV (ROAH) study, ACRIA has collaborated with researchers around the world and delivered much-needed HIV prevention, education, and related services to people over age 50, including training and capacity building to HIV and senior services providers across the U.S. and beyond. A registered nurse and lawyer, Tietz previously served as Deputy Executive Director for Operations at the Coalition for the Homeless, Deputy Executive Director for Day Treatment and Residential Services at Housing Works, and Director of Housing Opportunities for Persons With AIDS (HOPWA) at the Postgraduate Center for Mental Health. Earlier in his career, he worked for the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health in a senior staff position for the Deputy Commissioner. In addition, Tietz has long-advocated on behalf of LGBT rights and social justice issues through independent political activity, including campaign management.

Founded in 1991 in response to the slow pace of government and academic research on HIV, the AIDS Community Research Initiative of America brought for the first time an activist, community-based approach to the study of new treatments for HIV and related diseases, such as viral hepatitis. In addition to drug trials and behavioral research, ACRIA also offers a comprehensive HIV health literacy program, including training and capacity building services, materials development, consulting, and program evaluation.

Mitchell Warren

AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition (AVAC)

Mitchell Warren is the Executive Director of AVAC, an international non-governmental 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. Before this, he was the Senior Director for Vaccine Preparedness at the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) where he directed efforts to increase community understanding and national involvement in AIDS vaccine clinical trials. Warren previously spent four years as Vice President and Director of International Affairs for The Female Health Company (FHC), the manufacturer of the female condom, where directed efforts to design and implement reproductive health programs that integrate the female condom, and he led global advocacy efforts for expanded commitment to female-initiated prevention methods. Warren also spent six years at Population Services International (PSI) designing and implementing social marketing, communications and health promotion activities in Africa, Asia and Europe, including five years running PSI’s project in South Africa. Warren is a member of the Global HIV Prevention Working Group; the board of directors of the Global HIV Vaccine Enterprise; the WHO-UNAIDS HIV Vaccine Advisory Committee; the Office of AIDS Research Advisory Council of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH); and the AIDS Research Advisory Committee of the US NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Warren has degrees in English and History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and studied health policy at the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health.

Jane Waterman

International Aids Vaccine Initiative (IAVI)

Jane Waterman guides IAVI’s advocacy, policy, resource mobilization, communications and media relations programs. Jane has a wealth of experience in resource and policy development for HIV and AIDS programs, and technical knowledge of gender and development issues. Jane was previously on the senior management team of the International HIV/AIDS Alliance, a global network of national organizations that provide financial and technical support to community-based organizations in more than 40 countries. As director of external relations at the Alliance, she was responsible for developing and managing its fundraising and communications strategies, maintaining its relationship with corporate, philanthropic and government donors and raising the profile of the organization. Prior to joining the Alliance in 2004, Jane was Head of Resource Mobilization at the International Planned Parenthood Federation. She spent time in sub-Saharan Africa between 1987 and 1993, initially as a VSO volunteer and then with the British Council. She has a Master’s degree in Gender and Development, a Postgraduate Certificate in Education and a Certificate in Fundraising Management. Jane is also a graduate of the United Kingdom Cabinet Office/Henley Business School Top Management Programme.