Anonymous ID: 864b25 March 9, 2021, 8:22 p.m. No.13177111   🗄️.is đź”—kun   >>7142 >>7148 >>7187 >>7318 >>7423

During 2020 CROI Conference, Fauci pushes his "prevention" narrative noting "similarities" betweent HIV and COV2

 

https://www.bioworld.com/articles/504545-at-croi-two-way-street-between-hiv-and-sars-cov-2

 

In 2020, the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) was the first medical conference to go virtual, with two days advance warning, when news of infections resulting from a Biogen Inc. conference with about 150 attendees made it abundantly clear that SARS-CoV-2 was circulating, well, probably everywhere.

 

At that time, there were “about 350 cases in the whole United States, and most of those were on cruise ships,” reminisced Sharon Hillier, CROI 2021 program committee chair and professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive sciences and microbiology and molecular genetics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

 

A year later, confirmed U.S. cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection stand at just over 29 million, with half a million deaths. And while the global death toll of the HIV pandemic is an order of magnitude greater than that of COVID-19, the sheer speed by which the virus spread, remaking life across the globe, means that the world has “seen nothing like this since the influenza pandemic of 1919,” National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Tony Fauci told the audience at the CROI opening plenary.

 

Fauci, and others, spent time at the meeting dissecting how it is possible to learn from each pandemic for the other.

 

Fauci’s N’Galy-Mann plenary lecture, titled “Lessons from the Concurrent HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 Pandemics: A Two-Way Street,” looked at the high-level picture, but also delved into details like the identification and use of broadly neutralizing antibodies (bnAbs) for each disease.

 

Marina Caskey, professor of clinical investigation at the Rockefeller University, told the audience in her plenary lecture on “HIV-1 bnAbs: looking ahead” that SARS-CoV-2 was in some ways easier to target than HIV, because “highly potent neutralizing antibodies can be elicited soon after infection [with SARS-CoV-2]… this is in contrast to what we had seen with HIV.”

 

But the technologies and methods that were developed in the search for anti-HIV bnAbs facilitated the search when SARS-CoV-2 came around, with the result that it took less than a year for the FDA to give emergency use authorization for two antibody cocktails, bamlanivimab/etesevimab (Eli Lilly and Co./Junshi Biologics Co. Ltd./Abcellera Biologics Inc.) and REGN-Cov2 (casirivimab/imdevimab, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc.).

 

Fauci said the concept of treatment as prevention, first applied in HIV, is also proving to be useful in SARS-CoV-2.

 

At the meeting, clinical trial results showed that both bamlanivimab as a monotherapy and REGN-CoV2 could prevent disease when given as postexposure prophylaxis.

 

Meagan O’Brien, senior medical director of early clinical development and clinical experimental sciences, reported interim results from another treatment as prevention study, this one for household contacts of SARS-CoV-2-infected individuals. The interim data showed that a subcutaneous injection of REGN-CoV2 within 96 hours of exposure reduced the risk of infection for exposed household members by 50%, and reduced viral load and disease severity in individuals that did become infected.

 

Myron “Mike” Cohen, director of the Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, reported on the results of the BLAZE-2 trial, which used rapid response teams to treat nursing home residents with bamlanivimab as soon as a facility had reported one case.

 

Compared to placebo, treatment with bamlanivimab reduced the incidence of “mild or worse” COVID-19 in prophylactically treated patients by roughly 80%, and SARS-CoV-2 infection by roughly 70%. Cohen called the results “provocative and compelling” proof of concept that “passive immunity can prevent infection and prevent progression to disease.”