Results on HIV study expected next year

◆ just start,” she said.

“We have got several phases of clinical trial. Whenever we have a potential candidate, whether as preventive or treatment, we start in the lab, to say if I use this compound on cells what is going to happen, we call that pre-clinical or laboratory trials.

“If on that potential candidate is working, we now move on to lab animals, for example the guinea pigs, rats, rabbits and other small mammals which we use in the lab. We then move on to other animals which resemble human beings, the chimpanzees, gorillas, baboons, monkeys and so forth.”

Dr Mugodi said once the vaccine compounds are deemed safe and effective in these animals they are tested on people, starting with small numbers to ensure public safety.

“We don’t just start by giving it to many people, we start with a small number of healthy people to see if it is safe.”

The health expert said should the vaccine pass all these phases it is presented to Government for approval before being given to the people. Health and Childcare Minister, Dr David Parirenyatwa, hailed the studies saying any research aimed at eradicating HIV/Aids is welcome.

“Our position as a ministry is that any research which seeks to arrest the scourge of HIV/Aids is a welcome one,” he said.

“However, we obviously want due processes to be followed to ensure that public health is maintained. The regulatory boards are the ones responsible with ensuring that everything is done according to procedure.”

Nonetheless, going into the society to convince people to enroll in a voluntary clinical trial is not an easy task, particularly when dealing with HIV issues.

To make that work possible and easy, community engagement co-ordinator, Mr Charles Chasakara, said it is imperative to build a transparent relationship with communities.

“Researchers are there, interventions are there but without people, without communities you cannot do any research,” he said.

“So our job as community engagement staff is to prepare the community and to asses them, we want to prepare the community to accept research but most importantly we want them to understand and appreciate why we are conducting clinical trials.

“So what we do before we implement a clinical trial is that we go into the community to do some community mapping to identify communities’ stakeholders and identify the kind of people we are looking to work with.

“What has helped us greatly is that we work with community advisory boards, what the community advisory boards do is that they link us with the community, they link us with stakeholders in the community for us to do awareness campaigns, education sessions and sensitisation meetings. So when we identify a catchment area for our recruitment, we engage these guys in recruitment planning and education programmes and after we have done that we go into the communities to find volunteers.”

A community advisor, Mr Stanford Chimutimunzeve, said their work is to make sure that ethics are upheld during the research so that participants are not abused.

“As a community advisory board, we look to see if the investigators are following the code of ethics in clinical research so that participants don’t end up being abused.

“We also work closely with these guys to make sure that there are no myths and misconceptions in research, we mobilise the communities to make sure that they share the correct and accurate information about the research.”

Other countries in the West have already made strides in coming up with HIV prevention drugs. A daily pill called Truvada is already widely used in the US after it was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2012 as the first daily pill to help prevent HIV in some high-risk groups.

It is available through most private health insurance plans in the US and the state Medicaid system.