It’s probably a good sign when the keynote address on the opening night of a conference is interrupted by fireworks. That’s what happened to Ashley Haase of the University of Minnesota when he was close to the end of his address on HIV transmission on this opening night of the Keystone joint symposia on HIV Evolution, Genomics and Pathogenesis; and on Protection from HIV: Targeted Intervention Strategies, which is taking place from March 20-25 in Whistler, British Columbia. (The fireworks, I am told, take place every Sunday night as part of a “Fire & Ice Show” at the base of the Whistler Village Gondola.)
For this year's Keystone symposia, the organizers went back to the traditional combination of a meeting on HIV pathogenesis with a meeting on protection from HIV, said Andrew Robertson, the chief scientific officer for Keystone Symposia. However, he added, after last year’s success with combining the HIV vaccine meeting with a viral immunity symposium (see Antibody Fever, IAVI Report, Mar.-Apr. 2010), more unusual pairings will be tried every two or three years. “We are going to take apart this traditional pairing, which is pathogenesis plus vaccines, and mix it up,” Robertson said.
One of the organizers of this year’s meeting on protection from HIV is Mario Roederer of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. In his welcome address tonight, Roederer told the attendees that the field has been transformed by successful clinical trials such as RV144 (which provided proof of concept for vaccine protection), CAPRISA (the first statistically significant reduction in HIV infection from a microbicide candidate), and iPrEx (which provided proof of concept for oral preexposure prophylaxis). “These trials reinvigorate our research efforts, they provide a signal for the control of transmission, a signal which we can optimize and hopefully improve,” Roederer said.
This year's pathogenesis meeting has an additional focus on HIV evolution and genomics, said Michael Emerman of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, one of the organizers of the pathogenesis meeting. The evolutionary focus is to address the question, Emerman said, what evolution tells us about virus replication and about host responses. “There is a lot of work going on about host evolution and virus evolution that we think should be incorporated into the pathogenesis models,” he said. The genomics focus involves large scale genomic analyses of hosts and viruses, for example work by David Goldstein at Duke University who uses genome-wide association studies to identify genetic factors that influence HIV acquisition and control.