Global HIV Vaccine Enterprise annual stakeholders’ meeting: “Accelerating early phase HIV vaccine clinical research”

Susan Buchbinder is the Director of Bridge HIV, a grant-funded HIV prevention research unit housed in the San Francisco Department of Public Health, and a Clinical Professor of Medicine, Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). She received her undergraduate degree from Brown University and her MD from UCSF, where she completed a residency in primary care internal medicine. She has been providing care as an attending physician at the Richard Fine People’s Clinic at San Francisco General Hospital since completing her training. She teaches in the Advanced Traineeship in Clinical Research Program at UCSF and mentors students, residents, fellows and faculty.

She began her research career studying long-term HIV non-progressors and risk factors for disease progression in the San Francisco City Clinic Cohort, at the time, the longest-standing natural history study of sexually acquired HIV. Since then, her research has focused on risk factors for HIV acquisition and evaluating different strategies for reducing HIV incidence, including HIV vaccines and monoclonal antibodies, pre-exposure prophylaxis, topical vaginal and rectal agents, home HIV testing, combination strategies and technology to support these interventions. Addressing racial/ethnic and gender disparities has been a central focus of her work.

Susan has contributed to various CDC- and NIH-sponsored clinical trials networks, currently serving on the Executive Management Team of the HIV Vaccine Trials Network, where she chairs the Efficacy Trials Working Group. She is Chair of the Mosaico Phase 3 vaccine trial being conducted in the Americas and Europe, and Co-Chair of the Imbokodo Phase 3 vaccine trial in five sub-Saharan African countries. She co-leads the San Francisco Bay Clinical Trials Unit. She has chaired and served on the Scientific Program Committee of the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) and the HIV Research for Prevention (HIVR4P) meetings. She currently serves as Chair of the Enterprise Advisory Group of the Global HIV Vaccine Enterprise.

With Diane Havlir, she co-founded San Francisco Getting to Zero, a multi-sector consortium of more than 300 members built on a collective impact framework, to achieve zero HIV acquisitions, zero HIV-associated deaths and zero HIV stigma and discrimination in San Francisco.

Kundai Chinyenze is a physician with over 22 years’ experience working in East and Southern Africa and the UK in vaccine and other biomedical prevention R&D as well as capacity strengthening for R&D and service provision. She currently serves in IAVI as the ADVANCE Chief of party and IAVI Africa Director where she leads the development of affordable, globally accessible HIV vaccine candidates and other prophylactic biomedical interventions. ADVANCE is a multi-stakeholder and multi-sectoral partnership to accelerate HIV prevention research outcomes and global health impact.

Kundai’s clinical research experience includes the design and implementation of clinical trials for candidate vaccines, antibodies and microbicides. Kundai has led regional programs working with research partners in academic institutions, NGOs, private institutions; service provision (government, private sector), policymakers, regulators as well as international agencies including WHO & UNAIDS, where she has served on various working groups. Before joining IAVI, Kundai previously worked in microbicide research and in the HIV/AIDS care and treatment field as a Government Medical Officer, where she helped establish the first antiretroviral therapy clinic in Zimbabwe’s largest referral hospital and worked on the Zimbabwe National Antiretroviral Therapy Rollout Programme.

Maureen Luba is a Malawian global health practitioner currently serving as Program Manager at Cooper Smith. She helps lead the organization’s efforts around strengthening health information and data systems in Malawi to improve health outcomes, working closely with the government and other stakeholders. She is a passionate and staunch advocate for women’s health and has more than 13 years of experience working on HIV, TB and sexual and reproductive health and rights advocacy.

Maureen serves on several national, regional and global platforms, where she continues to advocate and fight for access to quality health services for underprivileged communities. This includes serving as a board member for the International Partnership for Microbicides. She is currently pursuing a Master of Medical Sciences in Global Health Delivery at Harvard Medical School.

Yves Lévy is a French physician researcher who is serving as CEO of the French Institute of Health and Medical Research from 2014 until 2028. Yves is a Professor of Clinical Immunology, specializing in immunotherapies and vaccines for HIV, immunodeficiencies and infectious diseases. From 1985, he worked in a research unit at Inserm, the French Institute of Health and Medical Research. Since 1996, he has directed the Department of Clinical Immunology and Infectious Diseases at Henri Mondor de Créteil Hospital.
In 2006, Yves became Scientific Director of the vaccine programme of the French National Agency for Research on AIDS and Viral Hepatitis (ANRS). From 2010 to 2012, he was Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, Paris-Est Créteil University. In 2011, he created the Vaccine Research Institute Laboratory of Excellence under the Investissement d’Avenir (Investment for the Future) programme and served as its Executive Director. In 2012, he became a special advisor to the Minister of Higher Education, Research and Innovation, Geneviève Fioraso.
In June 2014, after 29 years of working at Inserm, Yves was appointed its CEO by ministers Marisol Touraine and Fioraso. In October 2018, the Minister of Justice, Nicole Belloubet, appointed Yves as Advisor of State in Extraordinary Service. During a visit to the Democratic Republic of Congo in May 2019, the Minister of Europe and Foreign Affairs, Jean-Yves Le Drian, appointed Yves as his special envoy on the Ebola epidemic in Kivu.

Carey Hwang serves as Senior Vice President, Clinical Research, for Vir Biotechnology, where he is responsible for the company’s chronic infection clinical development portfolio. Since joining Vir in January 2021, Carey has overseen the development of the Vir lead hepatitis B candidates, VIR-2218 and VIR-3434, as well as its lead HIV vaccine candidate, VIR-1111.

Carey has focused his career on the study and development of treatments for serious infectious diseases, including HIV, hepatitis B and hepatitis C. His industry career began at Bristol Myers Squibb, conducting exploratory clinical and translational research focused on early-phase clinical development of HIV and hepatitis C treatments. He joined Merck & Co. in 2016, where he served as Executive Director and Product Development Lead in Global Clinical Development – Infectious Diseases and led the worldwide development and approval of two treatments for HIV.

He received his bachelor’s degree in molecular biology from Princeton University and his MD and PhD from West Virginia University with a dissertation focused on retroviral recombination. He completed his internal medicine residency and infectious disease fellowship at Vanderbilt University with research focused on the latent reservoir of HIV.

Roger Le Grand has been Head of the Immunology of Viral and Auto-immune Diseases Department at Infrastructure for Infectious Diseases Models and Innovative Therapies (IDMIT) at the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives (CEA) in France since 2015. He has been IDMIT Chief Executive since 2012 and was formerly Head of the IDMIT Department of Immuno-virology.

His research group is currently developing NHP models for HIV, HBV, dengue, human influenza, chikungunya, chlamydia, pertussis and new emerging diseases. Roger is particularly interested in host-pathogen interactions and the prevention of viral transmission.

His research has generated more than 150 referenced peer-reviewed publications. He has worked as an expert for several French national research agencies, the French government, the European TRANSVAC programme, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and WHO. The goal of his research is to study host response to infections to understand basic mechanisms of immunology and develop new prevention strategies for human infectious diseases. His work is mainly based on the use of preclinical models, including non-human primate models of human diseases, and the development of advanced technologies in cytometry and in vivo imaging, with a continuing effort to translate findings in experimental models to clinical practice.

Dr. Sandhya Vasan

Chief Medical & Science Officer (CMSO)

Senior Vice President, Global Infectious Diseases

Henry M. Jackson Foundation (HJF) for the Advancement of Military Medicine

Sandhya (Sandy) Vasan, MD, is the Chief Medical and Science Officer at the Henry M. Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine (HJF). She also serves as Senior Vice President of HJF’s Global Infectious Diseases portfolio, leading a longstanding collaboration with the U.S. Military HIV Research Program (MHRP) at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR).

Dr. Vasan earned her undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her MD through the Harvard–MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard Medical School.

She provides strategic scientific leadership for a global network of multidisciplinary teams working to advance basic, translational, and clinical research on vaccines, monoclonal antibodies, and HIV remission strategies.

Earlier in her career, she studied HIV vaccines, adjuvants and monoclonal antibodies at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center and The Rockefeller University. She then spent seven years in Bangkok, Thailand, where she conducted clinical trials of therapeutic interventions and preventive vaccines at the Armed Forces Research Institute of Medical Sciences as part of MHRP.

She serves on several external scientific advisory boards and boards of directors, including for the Good Participatory Practices Advisory Committee for the Coalition to Accelerate and Support Prevention Research at the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition (AVAC). She is co-PI for the I4C Immunotherapy for Cure, a Martin Delany Collaboratory funded by the National Institutes of Health.