When Dr. Nishila Moodley took the stage to receive a special achievement award, 700 scientists, clinicians, outreach specialists and community members attending the annual meeting of the HIV Vaccine Trials Network — the largest global network working to develop and test a preventive HIV vaccine — cheered her accomplishment.

Read more about HIV research on Giving Compass

They also celebrated the future of HIV vaccine research in South Africa.

Moodley is the first graduate of the HVTN’s South African HVTN AIDS Vaccine Early Stage Investigator Programme, an initiative to foster a new generation of homegrown HIV researchers.

Moodley understands the epidemic. Lifesaving antiretroviral drugs that transformed AIDS in Western countries in 1996 took more than a decade to reach South Africa. For complex biological, sociological and cultural reasons, young African women are particularly hard hit by HIV/AIDS.

In South Africa alone, 2,000 women aged 15 to 25 become infected with HIV every week. More than 100,000 a year die of AIDS.

Instead of feeling daunted by the devastation, Moodley was drawn to help. Soon her interest in HIV expanded to include addressing systemic problems affecting large groups of people rather than treating individual patients. For her Ph.D. project, Moodley focused on modeling the best way to get an HIV vaccine — once one is found to work — to the people who need it.

“You need to prove that there’s bang for the buck, basically,” Moodley said. “You need to show a substantial impact on your health outcomes. The point of the model that we’re developing is to show the effect that an HIV vaccine would have; and how without it, we won’t get a handle on the epidemic.”

Today, Moodley is working on modeling an even more comprehensive, countrywide implementation plan. In doing so, she aims to makes an economic case for why a vaccine is needed.

Read the source article at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center

Visit GivingCompass.org for related articles on medical research