Medicine and public acceptance

Preparedness usually means planning for an emergency and avoiding catastrophic outcomes. Not for Professor Peter Newman -- he is planning for a best-case scenario.

Newman, a professor at the University of Toronto's Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, wants to be ready for the thorny challenges of international clinical trials once a vaccine for HIV is discovered.

“Around 7,000 people are infected with HIV a day around the world,” he said. “You don’t want to slow down the development or rollout of an HIV vaccine.”

Recently, Newman, who is also Canada Research Chair in Health and Social Justice, was awarded a five-year, $3.6-million Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Team Grant recently. The focus of his project, Canadian HIV Vaccine Initiative (CHVI) Team in Social and Behavioral Research on HIV Vaccines, is to advance HIV vaccines by understanding the social, behavioural and ethical challenges of developing and testing these vaccines.

Problems encountered with previous trials have included poor communication that led to misunderstandings and skepticism regarding the intent of the trial.

Newman and a team of researchers from India and South Africa want to learn what happens in clinical trials so that proper supports can be developed for individuals and local communities affected by HIV. Some of the challenges include ensuring truly informed consent and negotiating the larger terms of a trial with international funders and pharmaceutical companies.

“This will help us support ethical HIV vaccine research and build towards the day an initial vaccine is ready for public licensure,” Newman said. “We’ll have some data to go on, rather than just our speculation about what might be the best way to share information.”

Also important for a project of this scale is the support needed to help manage the budget and the with the international partners.

“An important part of [getting] any kind of research grant is that you have the infrastructure to pull it off,” said Newman.

To help to leverage his CIHR grant, Newman applied to the provost’s major research project management fund for project management assistance. The provost’s office matched the $50,000 the faculty gave to support the proposal and the $100,000 will go toward the administration and management of the project, making it possible to devote all of the CIHR funding to research, future partnerships with India and South Africa and training students.

“This research will have a tremendous impact,” said Professor Faye Mishna, dean at the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work. “We all hope it will be needed sooner than anticipated.”

Newman agreed that his work has real practical value in the present.

“It’s both in the interest of protecting human beings in medical research,” he said, “and it’s in the long-term interest of developing a vaccine. It’s going to take many trials and many years to work on this.”

To read more about the project, see the Public Health Agency of Canada’s announcement and Newman’s paper , Integrating social and biomedical science in HIV vaccine research: obstacles, opportunities and ways forward, published in Expert Review Vaccines.