HIV Vaccine Being Developed In Dallas

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Dallas Researchers Fighting To Find HIV Vaccine
 
Ginger Allen DALLAS (CBS 11 / TXA 21) ―
 
The fight to find a cure for HIV and AIDS in North Texas started 30 years ago and continues today.

Now, a Dallas-based bio-medical company says it's now on the leading edge of this international fight. Promising research from three continents is coming together inside their lab.

The research would help people like Jim Frederick of Dallas, who was diagnosed with HIV in 1990. Complications have made walking a challenge for him, but riding a bicycle is exercise and an escape.

"With riding its one pedal at a time, one mile at a time, and it's the same way with life," he said.

20 years later, the marketing executive turned painter is going strong with a cocktail of six pills and two shots every day.

"I've done absolutely everything, everything," he said.

Research across town could soon reduce Frederick's daily regimen to two shots in a lifetime. The collective brain power of three men has taken them from Africa to France and back to Dallas, to the new BioCenter at Southwestern Medical District.

Their research dates back as early as Frederick's diagnosis.

"My first publication of that was in 1991, so this is a long story" said researcher Erwann Loret.

In the early 90s, Loret followed a tribe of African women in Gabon who had HIV that never progressed to AIDS. Dr. Loret said the HIV virus had a mutation: a change in a protein that protected the women. That work led him to the United States to work with scientist Craig Rosenfeld.

"What we're trying to do with this vaccine is try to recreate the natural sequence of events that occurred in Gabon 30 years ago" says Rosenfeld.

It was Dallas attorney Steve Malouf whose international travels brought the team together, forming Pecan Biotherapeutics to develop this HIV vaccine.

"By every benchmark by which pharmaceuticals are judge, at this stage, this vaccine has passed every single one of these," Malouf said.

The researchers said animal trials have proven successful, and within two years the team hopes its work in North Texas leads to humans trials.

"The BioCenter at Southwestern may very well be the epicenter of the functional cure for HIV" Malouf said.

If human trials prove the vaccine is effective as a treatment, Pecan Therapeutics is hopeful the science behind this will help develop a preventative vaccine as common as the measles, mumps and rubella shots in five to ten years.

"When they drive by here they will say the HIV vaccine was invented in Dallas," Rosenfeld said.


LINKS:

http://cbs11tv.com/local/Dallas.HIV.vaccine.2.1587935.html

http://pecanbio.com/

EDITED TO ADD:

This seems to be the Tat Oyi vaccine that's been discussed here before.