The 2013 conference for the HIV Vaccination Trials Network (HVTN) was from May 7-9 in Washington DC. I attended. My friends from the Seattle CAB Victoria Chinnel and Lisa White came to the event. The big news was that only one week before HVTN 505, a major phase II vaccination trial, had just ended all further vaccinations when a review from the Data Safety Monitoring Board found that the vaccine candidate being tested was certainly not effective. Two other major trials, the STEP study and the related African Phambili trial, ended the same way some time ago.
The conference was insightful and it cleared up some confusion I had. I also talked a bit with the HVTN communications team about having Wikipedia articles for clinical trials. My rationale is that the organization watch their Wikipedia articles because that is what anyone would find if they did Google searches for the trials.
After the conference Victoria and Lisa came back with me to NYC and stayed at my place a night, then stayed with one of Lisa’s school friends another two nights. We went to see Peter and the Starcatcher, which was Lisa’s first major theatre production and she seemed to like it. Besides that we talked about HVTN projects. My biggest concern is getting public information about the trials to people who want this information, and I have been concerned for a long time that not enough information about trials is available online.
I am always very happy to talk with people from Seattle and even more happy to see them. I feel like I work much harder here in New York than I ever did in Seattle and I often think of Seattle.