AIDS Vaccine Panel Discussion [Minutes]

7-APR-97 PACHA AIDS VACCINE PANEL DIscussION - p. 6

Consortium.
We have asked each individual to spend 10 minutes, 5 minutes in an overview
as far as their point of view and 5 minutes in addressing these draft recommendations.
Dr. McNeil, thank you.
DR. McNEIL: Thank you, Dr. Levine.
There should be a booklet that's going around. I brought 50 copies, so I think
there's enough for everybody at the table here. We'll conduct this like a lab briefing. I
won't use any overheads. With 5 minutes to present, I figured we could just go
through this quickly. Does everybody have a booklet?
DR. LEVINE: Why don't you start, and I'll do this.
DR. McNEIL: I appreciate the opportunity to present in front of the Advisory Council today.
This isn't the first time that the Department of Defense has been before this committee
and rendered some opinion and advice. Much of what I'm going to say today is a
reiteration of what we have said in the past, but perhaps rephrased in a way that may be
a little bit more compelling.
The first slide I put in here, again, is just to remind people why the U.S.
Department of Defense is in the HIV research and development business in the first
place. I won't read this for you, you can read these at your own leisure, but it's
important to realize that the military is a unique constituency, and our involvement in
HIV research and development is to primarily deal with the issues that arise in our
constituency, which are the Armed Forces of the United States and ally countries. It
also will spell out the rationale for why necessarily our focus in the Department of
Defense is global and international in scope and not directed solely to issues that are
domestic within the United States.
The second frame is an adaptation of a slide that was first developed by the
NIH. I think it's an excellent slide. It shows that there are two critical paths to the
creation and ultimate availability of a vaccine. There's basic research, which is the
engine of discovery and leads us quite often to candidate vaccines and strategies, which
are important starting points for the development process. If we didn't have basic
research to give us ideas about what candidate vaccines ought to do, there wouldn't be
anything to develop. Obviously, basic research facilitates the evaluation process in a
number of targeted ways as well, but from the perspective of development, it allows us
to have candidate vaccines to feed into the proximal end of the product development
pipeline.
On the other hand, testing and evaluation is the engine of vaccine development.