Andrew Rosindell – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Andrew Rosindell on 2016-05-24.
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps his Department is taking to advance the development of a cure for HIV; what assessment he has made of the development by the US government of HIV antibodies which bind to the target site and stop the virus from infecting the cell; and what international research partnerships his Department currently has for developing a cure for HIV.
Jane Ellison
The United Kingdom Government provides funding to the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI). IAVI has been instrumental in working with partners, including the United States National Institutes of Health who have undertaken the work to identify broadly neutralising antibodies from asymptomatic people infected with HIV. IAVI and its partners are still at an early stage of working with these broadly neutralising antibodies, to investigate how they might be used to prevent and treat HIV infection.
Funding from the UK Government has allowed IAVI to bring together expertise from academia and the pharmaceutical sector, and from across regions, including the UK and Eastern and Southern Africa, to collaboratively design and evaluate novel vaccine candidates, to demonstrate, in the longer-term, that at least one can be fully developed into an effective vaccine to help prevent HIV infection or AIDS.
