In late 2007, the National Institutes of Health and Merck announced that instead of protecting healthy people against HIV infection, the leading experimental AIDS vaccine may have made some participants in the STEP study more susceptible to the virus. In the next UGA Global Diseases: Voices from the Vanguard lecture, Barney Graham, a leading vaccine researcher, will talk about where the AIDS vaccine quest goes from here.
Graham will discuss how decisions about testing candidate vaccines take into account both scientific evidence and the empirical need for a preventive vaccine. His lecture, entitled “HIV Vaccine Development: What is the Next STEP?,” is March 17 at 5 p.m. in the Chapel. Open free to the public, the lecture will be followed by a reception.
In 2000, Graham was one of the first scientists recruited for the Dale and Betty Bumpers Vaccine Research Center at NIH. He now serves as its director of clinical studies. Before that, he led HIV vaccine testing at Vanderbilt University for 13 years and was involved in dozens of NIH-sponsored clinical trials.
“Barney Graham has been a key player in HIV vaccine research and development since the beginning,” said Patricia Thomas, Knight Chair in Health and Medical Journalism at UGA’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. Thomas wrote a 2005 book, Big Shot: Passion, Politics and the Struggle for an AIDS Vaccine, about the subject.
“If anyone knows how difficult it is to test vaccines in volunteers and to evaluate their immune responses in the laboratory, it’s Dr. Graham,” she said.
At NIH, Graham is responsible not only for the clinical evaluation of HIV vaccines, but also vaccines important for biodefense and protection against emerging infections.
The 2009 Voices from the Vanguard series concludes on April 14 at 5 p.m. in the Chapel with a lecture by Brown University’s Jennifer Friedman, an expert on parasitic diseases in children.
