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Abstract
Approximately 7,000 people catch HIV every day, twice as many as can be treated using current resources.
Sheena McCormack joined the global effort to find new strategies to prevent HIV in 1994, assessing first the potential of a candidate vaccine and then that of candidate vaginal gels. One of these gels, PRO2000/5, progressed through to the last stage of clinical testing, but turned out not to reduce HIV.
In 2010, researchers in the field were finally rewarded when two trials revealed that significantly fewer people caught HIV amongst participants taking a drug usually used to treat people who already have the virus. Although the results of later trials have been inconsistent, there was enough evidence for the US drug authorities to licence Truvada as a daily pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) in 2012.
The priority now is to promote HIV testing and embrace the range of proven strategies to reduce HIV, whilst continuing the search for new methods including a vaccine.
Biography
Sheena McCormack trained at Charing Cross Hospital Medical School and completed her post-graduate training in HIV/GU medicine at Chelsea and Westminster, where she is now a consultant working at 56 Dean Street.
In 1994, she joined the MRC Programme on HIV/AIDS which was subsequently absorbed into the MRC Clinical Trials Unit. She completed an MSc in Communicable Disease Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 1996.
She is co-Principal Investigator of the Microbicides Development Programme, and on the Executive Board of the UK HIV Vaccine Consortium. Sheena’s current trials include three early phase HIV vaccine trials (two at St Mary’s Hospital), and PROUD, a pilot study of oral PrEP for gay men in the UK – a joint initiative with Public Health England.