De Groot's research places her at forefront of push for HIV vaccine

The Brown researcher hopes that her Commencement forum will not only stimulate discussion, but also provoke action.

by Wendy Y. Lawton

AIDS is the leading cause of death in the world, already killing 25 million people. From the Bronx to Bangladesh, 42 million people are living with HIV and AIDS.

The statistics are stunning. But Anne De Groot says they haven't prompted sufficient outrage - or action - to slow this global assassin.

So the associate professor of community health likes to frame the devastation this way: "If a 747 went down in this country, there would be concern," De Groot says. "If a 747 went down every week, there would be alarm. But what if this happened every day for 10 years? That's AIDS. That's what the numbers mean."

The international impact of HIV and AIDS will be the focus of a Commencement forum titled "The AIDS Pandemic." De Groot will sit on the panel along with Ira Magaziner, former adviser to President Bill Clinton and current chairman of the Clinton Foundation AIDS Initiative, and Sandra Nusinoff Lehrman, director of the Therapeutics Research Program in the Division of AIDS at the National Institutes of Health. The trio will discuss the political, economic and social ramifications of the disease.

HIV and AIDS will surface in other ways during Commencement/Reunion Weekend.

Paul Farmer, a member of the International Scientific Committee's International Conference on AIDS, will receive an honorary degree from the University. And visitors can take in "Pandemic: Imagining AIDS," a 20-year look at AIDS through the work of 58 international photographers and artists, including Annie Leibovitz and Robert Mapplethorpe. Brown is the first university in the United States to host the exhibition, on display at the Watson Institute for International Studies.

De Groot hopes the Commencement forum will not only stimulate discussion, but also provoke action. De Groot will exhort the audience to, for example, lobby for research funding or volunteer for vaccine trials - which are taking place right in Providence.

"Everyone needs to be personally involved," she says.

De Groot walks her talk.

A practicing infectious disease physician, De Groot directs the University's TB/HIV Research Lab and created the HIV Education Prison Project newsletter, which provides treatment education to about 20,000 prison and community health providers worldwide.

Two years ago, she founded the Global Alliance to Immunize Against AIDS, or GAIA, a nonprofit that bills itself as "a global conscience in the fight against AIDS." The foundation's chief goal is to develop an HIV vaccine that can prevent the infection on all continents and sell it at a price that makes it accessible in even the poorest countries.

This approach is unique. Most HIV vaccines in development target strains of the virus found only in a few countries - often white, wealthy ones. And most HIV vaccines are being made by for-profit companies, whose price for prevention may be out of reach for people in Africa, China or India.

This month, in recognition of World AIDS Vaccine Day, GAIA presented a public progress report. Researchers have developed a vaccine candidate that triggered immune responses to several HIV strains in mice. De Groot calls this is a "valuable starting point" for the creation of a vaccine that can thwart at least 100 strains - enough to prevent HIV from spreading in places like Mali and Malaysia as well as America and Austria.

With hard work and luck, De Groot hopes that Phase III trials - human testing that represents the final hurdle before government approval - will begin in 2009.

But that is five years away.

"So we have to keep pushing - prevention, education, treatment," De Groot says. "AIDS is immediate. It is right now."