The Barbara Mc Clintock Project to Cure AIDS: Act Up’s Detailed Plan for an All Out Research Effort to Find a Cure for AIDS

1. Corporate domination of research agenda.
Priorities in both basic and clinical research are inordinately influenced by the interests
of major pharmaceutical companies. Research directions are thought of in terms of drug
outcomes, rather than understanding an illness in a way which could lead to a broad
range of effective treatments. Government research priorities become tied to corporate
profit interests primarily through direct and indirect conflicts of interests by members of
NIH policy-making committees and rank-and-file Principal Investigators (PIs), via either
consulting fees or stock ownership.
Other channels of influence are campaign contributions to, or lobbying of,
Congresspeople who control the NIH budget. University programs are influenced by the
widespread grants and endowments bestowed upon them by drug companies, as well as
by personal financial ties of research faculty to those companies.
The result of this entrenched system is a research agenda - both public and private -
skewed towards drugs likely to receive FDA approval (or occasionally, for which a
Congressional sponsor can be found), a closed-loop process favoring companies rich
enough to afford the huge expenses required. Thus, promising treatments are ignored or
rejected because:
1. they threaten the markets for already-approved or in-development products of
large companies;
2. they are backed by small companies with inadequate funds to navigate the
exhaustive FDA approval process; or
3. they are unpatentable (or already on the market for other purposes), making
FDA approval uneconomical to the sponsors.
As a result, over 100 treatments (including drugs, vitamins, herbs and no-cost health
practices) not backed by large pharmaceutical companies have been reported through
medical literature and/or clinical experience to improve the health of people with HIV
or AIDS to some degree, yet virtually none has had a large-scale clinical study which
could either show its ineffectiveness or move it ahead towards broad recognition and,
where relevant, FDA approval.
Furthermore, the corporate focus on profits promotes the development of treatments
which are extremely expensive and require indefinite use. When these are the primary
treatments investigated by NIH, the mentality created is one of accepting a few more
years of life of dubious quality, rather than a striving for a cure. In fact, a therapy from
outside the major companies which shows curative promise is viewed as a competitive
threat, often provoking moves in academic or government circles to discredit it.