News (Updated May 13, 2007)
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Published: May. 9, 2007 at 2:07 PM
The diseases kill more than 6 million people each year and impact hundreds of millions of lives, many of them children in Latin America, Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe, Tadataka Yamada, president of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, told United Press International.
"Knowing the impact of the death of one child on one family, it is too much," Yamada said at the BIO International Convention held this week in Boston.
Within a couple of years, vaccines against malaria and TB will be brought to the developing world for final-stage testing, while advanced trials of a few HIV vaccines are already under way in Africa and China, experts said.
The vaccines are specific for the strains of HIV found locally in those regions, said Seth Berkley, president and founder of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative.
"We are most proud of our clinical trials in Zambia, Rwanda and India. We are seeing extraordinary enrollment rates," Berkley said.
The treatments are likely to be only moderately effective, he said. But given the large number of people with HIV and the devastation of the disease, even a small reduction in its incidence is worth going forward, he added.
In the meantime, scientists will keep searching for a more potent vaccine. In the laboratory, they have their sights on a form of a simian immunodeficiency virus, which attacks monkeys, that is altered to be harmless.
"We know it works better than anything else so far. We should have focused on it long ago," Berkley said.
Non-profit foundations, rather than the private sector, are largely leading and funding the vaccine effort against malaria, HIV and TB, said Christian Loucq, interim director of the Malaria Vaccine Initiative.
Big drug companies see the small profits to be made on vaccines in developing nations and thus have not taken the initiative to develop them, Loucq said.
"It's viewed as a problem of no market," Loucq said. Malaria is especially challenging in attracting private companies, he noted.
"It's a slightly bigger problem to raise interest in malaria because it doesn't affect the developed world; it's mainly (a disease of) poor people."
However, the non-profit groups are moving to fill the gap, having raised and spent hundreds of millions of dollars so far.
The Malaria Vaccine Initiative has raised about $275 million from the Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and USAID. The initiative gives the funds to drug companies such as GlaxoSmithKline to develop the vaccines.
Within a year the initiative is preparing to bring a malaria-prevention vaccine to 16,000 children in Africa, Loucq said. It is one of 10 possible anti-malaria vaccines in various stages of development.
Malaria, a blood parasite transmitted by mosquitoes, infects 300 million to 500 million people each year and causes the death of 1 million, mostly children.
The group's goal is to have a vaccine by 2015 that prevents malaria in 50 percent of people for at least one year, he said.
On the TB front, the group hopes to have that disease under "global control" within 15 to 20 years, said Jerald Sadoff, president and chief executive officer of Aeras Global TB Vaccine Foundation.
To that end, the foundation will bring a tuberculosis vaccine for final testing to South Africa and the south of India by 2008, Sadoff said.
TB is an airborne bacterial disease that infects 8 million people a year and kills 2 million, many who also have HIV, he said.
Sadoff noted that some TB strains have become resistant to treatment, including the deadly XDR strain. It was found in South Africa last year, when 51 of 52 people infected with it died within 20 days, he said.
Fri May 11, 2007 11:36 AM ET
By Amy Norton
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A short questionnaire may help spot a broad range of risky behaviors in teenagers -- from unprotected sex to substance abuse to suicidal thoughts -- a new study suggests.
It's well-known that adolescence is a time of experimentation, the authors point out. An estimated 80 percent of teens have used alcohol by the 12th grade, while half have tried marijuana and 60 percent have had sex, often unprotected.
Teenagers who try one risky behavior are prone to experimenting with others. Yet when teenagers see their doctors, even for mental health issues, there may be little discussion of drug abuse, unsafe sex and other behaviors that jeopardize their health.
Anecdotally, said Dr. Celia M. Lescano, the lead author of the new study, it seems family doctors and other health providers do not regularly ask teenagers about risky behaviors.
"Even as adults, think about what your doctor asks you," she told Reuters Health.
"How much time do you spend talking about sexual partners and what you are using to protect yourself from HIV? How many times has your physician asked you whether your partner physically, sexually or emotionally abuses you?" said Lescano, of Brown Medical School and the Bradley/Hasbro Children's Research Center in Providence, Rhode Island.
What's needed, according to Lescano and her colleagues, is a brief but comprehensive screening tool that picks up on teenagers' risk-taking.
For their study, the researchers used a short questionnaire they call the Adolescent Risk Inventory (ARI) to assess sexual behavior and emotional and behavioral issues among 134 teenagers being treated for psychiatric disorders.
The questionnaire touches on topics ranging from condom use to fighting to "self-harm" -- which includes severe problems like suicide attempts and starving or vomiting to lose weight.
The researchers found that the ARI reliably detected a range of risky behaviors, and also picked up on certain patterns. In particular, teenagers who had ever been abused or who admitted to self-harm were at heightened risk of unsafe sexual behaviors and sexually transmitted diseases.
Lescano and her colleagues report the findings in the journal Child Psychiatry & Human Development.
Although this study involved teenagers with psychiatric disorders, Lescano said the hope is that the ARI could be used by primary care doctors and mental health professionals to catch risky behaviors in all teenagers.
While some health professionals may already screen for these problems, she noted, it needs to be done more consistently and more frequently to be most effective.
SOURCE: Child Psychiatry & Human Development, April 2007.
Fri May 11, 2007 11:09 AM ET
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Gilead Sciences Inc. will cancel its deal with Indian drug makers to produce cheaper copies of its HIV drug, Viread, if it does not get a patent from Indian authorities, a company official said on Friday.
The deal lets companies produce and distribute Viread to 95 developing countries.
The company has filed an application with the Indian Patent Office and its plea will come up for hearing on Tuesday.
Gilead's senior vice-president, Gregg Alton, said he hoped the company would obtain a patent, but added that the license agreements with Indian firms would lapse if it did not get a patent.
"The license ... would not continue because the license agreement only provides access to our asset which is our patent," Alton told Reuters.
"If we don't have a patent then there is nothing for us to enforce our partnership.
"We would not be able to work in India as a company. And we don't think that is a very good outcome," said Alton, who is in New Delhi for a hearing of the patent application.
Gilead has signed agreements with Alkem Laboratories Ltd., Aurobindo Pharma Ltd., Emcure Pharmaceuticals, FDC Ltd., Hetero Drugs, Matrix Laboratories Ltd., Medchem International, Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd., Shasun Chemicals & Drugs Ltd and Strides Arcolab Ltd. in 2006.
HIV products contributed 68 percent to the company's first quarter revenue of $1 billion.
In April, India's health minister, Anbumani Ramadoss, said, in reference to a dispute with Novartis, that New Delhi could be forced to overrule patents and issue licenses for firms to produce vital drugs if deemed in the public interest.
Alton said Gilead's patent would not raise the prices of HIV drugs as they will encourage competition and allow it to bring prices down.