The final day of #HIVR4P2024 ended on a roaring note as conference co-chair Linda-Gail Bekker exhorted attendees to not be deterred by the challenges facing the field but to focus on the promising science and community engagement featured over the past few days and to “go off and prevent!” The audience was also energized by several activists who urged researchers to remember the LGBTQIA+ and indigenous communities they serve by centering inclusive funding, policymaking, and accessibility in all studies.
The day offered sessions on novel approaches to HIV vaccines and immunotherapies, as well as discussions on the critical role of community engaged science in driving HIV prevention research and access to interventions such as PrEP.
IAVI Africa’s Vincent Muturi Kioi, HIV vaccine product development team lead, described the need, given the continuing burden of the HIV pandemic, to accelerate preclinical and clinical studies to enable iteration and development of a vaccination regimen. His talk, entitled “mRNA Technology for HIV Vaccines: Hopes and Challenges,” described IAVI and partners’ germline-targeting vaccine strategy and its use of Moderna’s mRNA platform. This strategy requires multiple immunogens to target multiple antibody lineages, and so reducing time from immunogen identification to clinic will be critical, as will reducing production costs. Using mRNA provides several advantages on both counts.
IAVI India’s Kashma Goyal spoke on “Science simplified – co-creating games with key communities to communicate HIV germline targeting vaccine design concepts in India and South Africa.” This intervention aims to demystify germline-targeting given the promise of this HIV vaccine development strategy.
Liberty Sam-Urom, a member of a community working group convened by IAVI to accelerate bnAb research, and IAVI’s Katerina Chapman also presented “Lessons learned from engaging community stakeholders in product development for a proposed novel HIV intervention in early-phase clinical development.” In their talk, both emphasized the necessity of linking early community engagement activities with the product development pathway.
Sharon Lewin of The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity gave the final plenary talk on promising synergies between HIV remission (ART-free viral control) and prevention research. Urging researchers to work across disciplines, she said, “We need a vaccine, and we need a cure, and we can’t be deterred by the complexity of both challenges.”
