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AVAC in the News

  • Janssen pharmaceuticals, the research branch of Johnson & Johnson, said yesterday that they were "disappointed" that the latest HIV candidate vaccine, and the only one left in a phase III efficacy trial, had failed to reach pre-specified standards of efficacy. For this reason, they had terminated the Mosaico Study, which gave the vaccine or a placebo to 3,900 cis and trans gay and bisexual men and trans women in the Americas and Europe.

    January 19, 2023
    aidsmap
  • It’s back to the drawing board for a potential HIV vaccine, as Janssen Pharmaceuticals recently announced a Phase 3 investigational study into a potential regimen was not effective in preventing HIV infection. The Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson announced in January that their independent Data and Safety Monitoring Board uncovered no safety issues with their Mosaico study, but also found it didn’t prevent HIV effectively, leading them to discontinue the trial.

    January 19, 2023
    Yahoo News
  • The only vaccine against HIV still being tested in late-stage clinical trials has proved ineffective, its manufacturer announced on Wednesday, another disappointment in a field long beset by failure. Dozens of HIV vaccine candidates have been tested and discarded over the past few decades. The latest defeat sets progress toward a vaccine back by three to five years, experts said. Still, other options in early-stage trials may yet turn out to provide a powerful bulwark against HIV.

    January 18, 2023
    New York Times
  • Another large trial has been discontinued after Johnson & Johnson’s experimental HIV vaccine, which uses the same technology as the company’s COVID-19 vaccine, was shown to be safe but did not provide protection against HIV acquisition. Today’s announcement by the National Institutes of Health adds to a long string of disappointments in HIV vaccine research.

    January 18, 2023
    POZ Magazine
  • Yet another experimental HIV vaccine has failed. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases reported Wednesday that a Phase 3 clinical trial of a vaccine was stopped because the vaccine was ineffective at preventing HIV infection. The vaccine was being developed by Janssen, the vaccine division of Johnson & Johnson.

    January 18, 2023
    STAT
  • Johnson & Johnson halted a big trial of its experimental HIV vaccine in the Americas and Europe, a disappointment for hopes of battling the global infectious disease after a similar form of the shot failed earlier in a study in Africa. The Mosaico study ended early after an independent data and safety monitoring board found it didn’t significantly reduce the risk of HIV infection, the company said Wednesday in a statement.

    January 18, 2023
    Bloomberg
  • A new, long-lasting drug could be a game-changer for preventing HIV infections, experts say. Advocates are hopeful that those who need it most in low- and middle-income countries will not have to wait for it as long as they have for previous HIV drugs. But questions remain about access and price. The drug is called cabotegravir and is delivered as a shot once every other month. In clinical trials, it did a better job at preventing infection than another option — a pill taken once a day.

    December 1, 2022
    VOA
  • Mitchell Warren, Executive Director of AVAC, talks HIV prevention, access to medicine, treatment and ending the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

    December 1, 2022
    General
    ABC News
  • HIV prevention pills are becoming more widely available in South Africa and the country is set to soon start piloting the use of an HIV prevention injection and vaginal ring. But merely having these pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) tools available in clinics and other places does not mean people will use them. This dynamic is nothing new.

    December 1, 2022
    Spotlight
  • PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) has become such a central part of HIV prevention that it can be hard to remember that in the decade before its 2012 approval by the US Food and Drug Administration, “PrEP was a code word for unethical research.” So says Mitchell Warren, longtime head of the HIV prevention advocacy group AVAC, recalling how, in the 2000s, early trials to determine PrEP’s efficacy fell apart in Cameroon, Nigeria, and Thailand amid accusations from activists that researchers were not treating trial subjects ethically—for instance, by not necessarily guaranteeing lifetime HIV tre

    November 22, 2022
    TheBody

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