Page 66 - A Widening Idea of Health and Health Research - The South African Medical Research Council from Creation to COVID

Positively into the New South Africa: The MRC, 1995–2012

HIV/AIDS

In addition to continuing its support for laboratory research into the Human
immunodeficiency virus (HI virus) and its behaviour, after 1994 the MRC expanded
the scope of its involvement in the fight against this epidemic too. ‘I have come to
realise that a singularly medical approach is woefully inadequate’, Makgoba admitted
in 1999. As a result, the MRC now, for example, sought to extend AIDS education
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among teenagers in novel ways by using photo-comics to ‘Get Wise About AIDS’ (as
its programme title put it) and to include in its purview the plight of AIDS orphans.
At the same time it gave its full backing to the creation of the external HIV Prevention
Research Unit in KwaZulu-Natal, which prioritized interventions to try to check
infection, for instance by participating in trialling foreign-made microbicides, by
determining the HIV status of a representative sample of truck-drivers who were
thought to be super-spreaders of the disease on their trips across the country, and
even by piloting the training of HIV counsellors and home-carers.
In fact, its role in HIV prevention went even further. In 1999 it became the co-
ordinating hub of the major South African AIDS Vaccine Initiative (SAAVI) project,
a pioneering, public–private Presidential project to develop an anti-AIDS vaccine
within a decade by pooling the know-how of a wide range of scientists, both within
and without the MRC. So high a priority was this goal across the world that the project
was soon able to leverage significant funding from both local and international sources,
which were devoted to equipping laboratories, improving research techniques, training
young scientists and technicians, and using the MRC’s Animal Centre at Delft on the
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Cape Flats to breed macaques for vaccine experimentation. By 2001, 200 local and 120
international scientists at ten different institutions were working in the programme,
which, on Makgoba’s insistence, had to focus on producing a vaccine that targeted the
specific HIV clade dominant in Africa rather than that in Europe and North America.
SAAVI’s first director, Dr Tim Tucker, termed this following an ‘activist-science
model’. ‘The clinicians would be sending samples to the immunologists to understand
disease progression and then sending the same samples to those developing vaccines
for their inclusion in test vaccines in the laboratory. The best performing of these
vaccine candidates were then sent to companies in the UK and US for manufacture in
preparation for clinical trials.’ SAAVI ‘catapulted the HIV vaccine research community
in South Africa from being “contributors” to being “drivers” of the global agenda’, he
declared proudly. ‘Diverse players worked together in an inclusive, globally relevant
model towards achieving the goal of a locally relevant, effective HIV vaccine for
southern Africa.’
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