Special Session, Bridging to the Future

Monday 24th May 2010

The Microbicide Development Strategy

The Alliance for Microbicides Development launched a report entitled ‘Microbicides: Ways Forward’. The report attempts to look at the pipeline of new prevention technologies during the last year and priorities for this year. It suggests nine priority areas that the field should be working towards.

Key Points

Acceleration in efforts to develop a range of options for HIV prevention from 1994 to 2010 (to date 70 preclinical and 7 clinical trials)

The Nine priority areas of work include the following:

• Advancement of Lead Products
• Optimisation of Clinical Trial Design and Management
• Building strategically on Behavioural and Social Science Research
• Coordinating Function
• Regulation
• Donor Engagement and Education
• Costs
• Advocacy and Civil Society Engagement
• Evaluating Progress

The CHAARM Programme

The CHAARM Programme stands for ‘Combined Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Microbicides’. The programme is funded by the European Commission and aims to develop existing and new microbicides with focus on new combinations. The programme received the funding on 1st January 2010 and will end 31st December 2010, in total 17 million Euros. It will focus on the following:

• Investigate the potential of protease inhibitors and protease inhibitors as microbicides.
• Develop small molecule inhibitors of HIV-1 reverse transcriptase and integrase.
• Develop small molecule inhibitors of HIV-1 fusion and further development of novel proteins.

The programme is a collaboration of researchers from different universities, institutions and research sites from all over the world.

The joy of Tech

Within the field on HIV prevention, advocates and researchers have been looking at innovative ways of communicating information to the public. The joy of tech focused on different approaches of messaging, emphasising the need to be smart and strategic especially with funding.

Key Points

• Use different ways to maximise communication
• List serves
• Teleconference calls
• Reports
• Web based learning (webinars)
• Blog/feed
• Face book/ Twitter
• Flicker

Grassroots to Government

This session focused on the role of community advocates in mobilising government support for Microbicide and prevention research with case studies from South Africa and Kenya. It emphasised that grassroots communities are important and should be involved in broader prevention dialogue with governments as they need to support research, demand from communities is important and understanding communities is essential during relevant research agendas. The speaker also urged that grassroots communities should be engaging with existing political structures, capacity building and technical assistance where needed and should build partnerships with government officials. In conclusion communities can and do influence national policy, governments are receptive to community input and resourcing certain skills and being strategic is important.