Paul Stoffels, M.D., Chief Scientific Officer, Johnson & Johnson, has spent much of his career fighting AIDS. To mark World AIDS Day (Dec. 1, 2016) our colleagues at Johnson & Johnson sat down with Dr. Stoffels to discuss his career and the progress that has been made. This post first appeared on www.jnj.com.

AIDS: A Scientist's Story

In 1983, Dr. Stoffels began his career in healthcare as a trainee in a hospital in Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, while he was still a medical student. This was when he first started seeing a large number of patients with HIV disease, and we only just learned that the cause of disease was viral. It was the beginning of the epidemic.

A massive number of people in Africa became infected — by 1986 as many as two million people had HIV. Patients were dying, children were being left without families, and there was a significant impact on overall life expectancy with a decrease of 20 years in several countries on the southern part of the African continent.

                                

Remarkable Progress

HIV today is a very different disease than it was when it emerged over 30 years ago. Today, we have characterized the disease and understand what its mechanisms are, how it is transmitted, and what to do and not to do for treatment. We have gone from treating HIV patients with up to two dozen pills a day to being able to treat them with one pill a day. People are living long healthy lives, thanks to the development of more than 20 drugs and combination therapies, in first, second and third line.

Reflecting on the progress we have made against HIV Dr. Stoffels shares in his interview a very personal experience with HIV:

“One of my best friends, a doctor was infected with HIV when I was in Africa back in '87. He was my best friend and I worked my whole life to try to save him and keep him alive and it worked, he's still alive today," said Dr. Stoffels speaking about the personal impact of HIV research. "He was a research object but also the happy recipient of new medicines. He had his own kids then, 6 and 7 years old, when we were in Africa. Today, he has grandkids. We would have never, ever believed that he would even reach 1990.”

We Are Working Relentlessly to Make HIV History

The HIV research community has truly made significant progress, but we acknowledge that while the outcome of HIV treatment is good, it still requires patients taking medication lifelong, every day, without missing one pill. Preventing HIV altogether would be far better. Over two million people are newly infected with HIV every year, and that number has not changed since 2010. A special issue of The Lancet HIV published in July focuses on the work that still needs to be done to improve HIV prevention efforts, with its editors emphasizing that, “…although the gains in treatment are most definitely to be applauded, prevention must not get left behind.”

HIV prevention has to be holistic. Over the last 10 years, Johnson & Johnson has developed three transformational HIV medicines. We also have a unique collaboration with the International Partnership for Microbicides (IPM) for the development of a vaginal ring that delivers dapivirine, a molecule from our research labs, as a microbicide, which could help prevent the sexual transmission of HIV.

The development of a safe and effective vaccine is the “holy grail” and would represent a historic scientific achievement that could change the future of populations worldwide. However, HIV attacks the immune system itself, so stimulating the immune system with a vaccine to mount a protective response is very challenging. We believe it can be done with approaches that are both scientifically creative and highly collaborative.

Our next generation approach for the development of a potential HIV vaccine includes strong collaborations with multiple partners. Results from pre-clinical studies in non-human primates show that a heterologous prime-boost HIV-1 vaccine regimen, in development at our Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies, might provide for an efficacious vaccination strategy for preventing HIV-1 infection in humans. And based on these pre-clinical data, the vaccine regimen including Ad26 based vectors delivering mosaic HIV-1 antigens is now being evaluated in an ongoing Phase 1/2a international clinical study in 400 healthy volunteers.

United with our partners, our ultimate goal is to help ensure that every baby is born HIV-free, adolescents and adults stay HIV-free, and people living with HIV have access to the medicines they need. The global community made previously unimaginable progress in the 30 years since the emergence of the disease. Continued focus on the development of an HIV vaccine can make HIV history.

Visit janssen.com/hiv to learn more about our focus in the area of HIV. Also visit jnj.com/HIV to see additional stories of progress and hope of how Johnson & Johnson stands united with the global community to fight HIV and care for those infected and impacted.