Emory
University Lecture on Pursuit of AIDS Vaccine Celebrates Opening of
Hope Clinic
To celebrate
the dedication of The Hope Clinic — a newly created Emory clinical research
facility devoted to clinical trials of promising new vaccines and therapeutic
interventions — the Emory Vaccine Research Center will sponsor a public
lecture on "Opportunities and Challenges in the Pursuit of an AIDS Vaccine."
The lecture, by Mark Feinberg,
M.D., Ph.D., medical director of The Hope Clinic and Emory professor
of medicine and microbiology and immunology, will take place Wednesday,
April 24 at 7 p.m. in the Woodruff Health Sciences Center Administration
Building Auditorium at 1440 Clifton Rd. on the Emory campus. The lecture
is free and open to the public.
Dr. Feinberg will discuss
some of the most exciting work of our times. In the 20 years since AIDS
was first identified, HIV infection has emerged as the most devastating
disease humankind has ever faced. Dr. Feinberg will talk about the critical
need for an effective AIDS vaccine, the challenges to its successful
development, and explain how recent research advances at Emory and elsewhere
are providing hopeful opportunities to enable achievement of this essential
goal.
The lecture is also a thank
you to the community, says Dr. Feinberg, especially those generous Atlantans
who participate in clinical trials of promising new vaccines out of
respect for science and love of humanity. The Emory Vaccine Research
Center is home to one of the largest basic and preclinical vaccine research
programs at any university worldwide.
The Hope Clinic of the Emory
Vaccine Research Center provides new opportunities to translate basic
research findings into useful clinical advances to ameliorate global
public health threats, including AIDS and malaria. The clinic is strategically
located in downtown Decatur to enable community-based clinical research.
It was created through the combined efforts of the Emory University
School of Medicine, the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center and
the Emory Center for AIDS Research (CFAR).
Dr. Feinberg has been a national
leader in HIV research since the earliest days of the epidemic. Prior
to joining the Emory faculty in 1998, he served as medical officer for
the Office of AIDS Research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH)
and as chair of the NIH Coordinating Committee on AIDS Etiology and
Pathogenesis Research. He has held numerous national leadership positions
in AIDS and HIV research. He has been a member of scientific review
panels for the NIH, the World AIDS Foundation and the Pediatric AIDS
Foundation. He served as the executive secretary of the NIH Panel to
Define Principles of Therapy of HIV Infection that issued recommendations
concerning the optimal use of newly available antiretroviral drugs.
After receiving both his
M.D. and his Ph.D. from Stanford University School of Medicine, Dr.
Feinberg completed his residency at Harvard's Brigham and Women's Hospital.
He conducted research in the laboratory of Dr. David Baltimore at the
Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass. Dr.
Feinberg was on the faculty of the University of California at San Francisco
(UCSF) from 1991-1995 and was associate director of the UCSF Center
for AIDS Research and director of the UCSF CFAR Virology Core Laboratory.
He has served on the Committee for Oversight of AIDS Activities at the
Institute of Medicine and the National Academy for Sciences and on the
Institute of Medicine's Roundtable for the Development of AIDS Drugs
and Vaccines. In 1997 Dr. Feinberg received the five-year Elizabeth
Glaser Scientist Award from the Pediatric AIDS Foundation to support
his research in HIV vaccine development.
He is principal investigator
of several HIV/AIDS biomedical prevention (vaccines, microbicides) and
sociocultural studies (human decision making related to HIV vaccines)
that are relevant to women's health. At The Hope Clinic of the Emory
Vaccine Research Center, Dr. Feinberg has been conducting Phase I clinical
trials to assess the safety and immunogenicity of several experimental
AIDS vaccines. In the laboratory, he is developing additional vaccine
strategies and studying the specific mechanisms of immune response to
vaccines.
For more information about
Dr. Feinberg's Emory lecture, please call 404-712-9266.
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