Capitol Hill Briefing Focuses on the Promise of Microbicides
IPM CEO featured speaker along with researchers from NIH, South Africa

A briefing held Dec. 3 at the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, D.C. brought together key leaders in the HIV prevention field, and called public attention to the global effort to produce safe and effective microbicides that could protect women against the pandemic.

“Women continue to account for half of all people living with HIV/AIDS worldwide,” said Cindy Hall, president of Women’s Policy Inc., sponsor of the event, which attracted nearly 200 participants, including legislative staff and advocates. The event was funded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Ms. Hall stressed that the problem is also local to the nation’s capitol, where the number of women living with AIDS has increased more than 75 percent since 2002.

Dr. Salim Abdool Karim, a panel speaker and pro vice-chancellor and professor at the Nelson R. Mandela School of Medicine, University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, illustrated how the pandemic has affected girls and women in Africa. “In sub-Saharan Africa, for every teenage boy infected, there are six teenage girls infected,” said Dr. Karim, who is also director of the Centre for the AIDS Program of Research in South Africa. “And one in three pregnant women walking into a prenatal clinic for their first visit is already HIV-infected.”

“The need for microbicides is truly a global issue,” said IPM’s Dr. Zeda Rosenberg, also a featured speaker at the event. “Women need HIV prevention tools they can initiate — and not rely on anyone to initiate for them.” Dr. Rosenberg explained that current methods alone aren’t sufficient due to a mix of biology and culture. Women, especially in developing countries, often lack the ability to insist on condom use or monogamy from their partners.

Dr. Rosenberg expressed great cause for optimism, noting that while “early generation” products have not been shown to prevent HIV, the “next generation” of microbicides are based on the same highly potent antiretroviral drugs used to successfully treat the virus and show great promise. Growing support from donors and pharmaceutical companies as well as scientific, advocacy and local communities have also increased the field’s ability to succeed in its effort.

Panel speaker Dr. Roberta Black, the chief of the Microbicide Research Branch of the Prevention Sciences Program at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, noted that drug development in general is always a long and difficult process. “What we lose in failures, we gain as we move forward with new products,” she said. When success does occur, millions of women will benefit.

“But developing a microbicide is one of many important steps,” said Dr. Rosenberg. “We will all fail in our effort if all we do is develop a microbicide.” Equally important is to ensure that once a microbicide is developed, it will be accessible to the women who need it. That, she said, “takes leadership and political will.” She pointed out that PEPFAR and other programs can play an important role in ensuring that a microbicide will be widely available and affordable.

Dr. Black explained that microbicides will be one element of a larger “multi-component HIV prevention strategy,” noting that controlling the HIV pandemic requires not just one prevention method, but a variety of strategies that will work for different people.

“Microbicides are a key part of a new stream of HIV prevention efforts,” said Dr. Karim. “There is no question that we need a women-controlled HIV prevention method to alter the course of the pandemic.”

The briefing was sponsored in cooperation with Sens. Barbara Mikulski and Olympia Snowe, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Lisa Murkowski; Reps. Eddie Bernice Johnson, Mary Bono Mack, Jan Schakowsky and Christopher Shays.