120 YEARS OF ADVANCES FOR MILITARY AND PUBLIC HEALTH
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The U.S. Military HIV Research Program works closely with the Armed Forces Research Institute of Medical Sciences in Bangkok, Thailand. U.S. Army photo
Tanzania, or Uganda, or Nepal, or any of our other various clinical sites, their people benefit from that work. In those countries, we’re known as the Walter Reed Program [for malaria work] or [as the Walter Reed] Project [for HIV work], named for MAJ Reed, who established the mosquito as the yellow fever carrier and laid the groundwork for the yellow fever vaccination. But since Reed’s discovery, the institute has added a few layers to that capacity – to translate research into products with the potential to save lives. Right, and this really hit home for me when we held ceremonies to observe World AIDS Day. We had a couple of speakers here, one of whom was Dr. Edmund Tramont, who was more or less the founder of WRAIR’s effort in the Military HIV Research Program. Another was Dr. Mary Marovich, who now heads the vaccine research program at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Both of them were former WRAIR senior scientists here. One of the things that really stood out was that some of the improvements in the development of treatments or vaccines – including developments that happened outside of WRAIR, or in partnership with federal interagency organizations, commercial or private-sector partners – happened because of the clinical trials networks that we established through WRAIR and our labs in Kenya and Thailand to test these products, some of which were developed at WRAIR, but most of which were developed in collaboration with other organizations. In some ways, our nation’s ability to participate in this research is reliant on the infrastructure we’ve set up through the military, to do the research necessary to protect our Soldiers. That infrastructure has attracted funding from the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR. We receive support from the Gates Foundation to support research not only with HIV, but also with malaria and dengue fever, which are diseases of great concern to the military because
INTERVIEW