PrEPVacc leaders in IAVI spotlight

IAVI Report’s April 2019 cover story ‘The best is yet to come’ by Kristen Jill Kresge examines Africa’s contributions to HIV vaccine research and speaks to PrEPVacc Chief Investigator Professor Pontiano Kaleebu and PrEPVacc Coordinating Investigator, Dr Eugene Ruzagira, who are both at the MRC/UVRI and LSHTM Uganda Research Unit.

Professor Kaleebu, director of the MRC/UVRI and LSHTM Uganda Research Unit, has been working with PrEPVacc partner IAVI since 2001 to develop local capacity to conduct HIV vaccine trials and has witnessed dramatic progress:

“It was our plan from the beginning that we needed to build capacity locally,” he says. Uganda was the first country in Africa to conduct an HIV vaccine trial in adults and also the first to conduct a pediatric HIV vaccine trial. “This was critical to showing that this could happen in Africa,” adds Kaleebu.

Dr Ruzagira recalls his early experiences of the HIV/AIDS epidemic when there was often not much a doctor could do but treat the hallmark infections that accompanied the development of AIDS:

“As a young medical student in Uganda in the late ’90s, there wasn’t much I could do for patients,” he says. “I just had to watch them waste and die.” This experience had a profound effect on the would-be malaria researcher, and soon he switched the focus of his research to HIV/AIDS.

Dr Ruzagira comments that PrEPVacc, the first HIV vaccine trial to evaluate vaccine efficacy in the context of oral pre-exposure prophylaxis, is a collaborative effort but one in which African investigators play a leading role, and that he feels fortunate to have the opportunity to be coordinating the trial:

“Being part of the PrEPVacc project has been a great opportunity for me to contribute to HIV vaccine evaluation in Africa, while interacting with and learning from world-class experts in the field,” he says.

Read the full IAVI Report here: The best is yet to come