Rethink HIV: Vaccine Research and Development Perspective, Salomon

Perspective Paper

The aim of RethinkHIV is to assess the expected costs and benefits associated with a range of different alternatives for addressing the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The specific charge is to consider how an additional USD 2 billion per year over the next 5 years could “best be spent … given some reasonable assumptions about sensible policies in subsequent decades.” The assessment paper by Hecht, Jamison and others focuses on development and future deployment of a new preventive HIV vaccine (Hecht et al. 2011). This perspective paper takes the assessment paper as a starting point, and proceeds in three main sections. The first offers some reflections on the general enterprise of priority-setting for investments in research and development toward future health technologies. The second provides a summary and brief critique of the assessment paper with the aim of drawing out some of the most significant findings from the analysis, and highlighting the implications of these findings and their sensitivity to key assumptions and modeling choices. This second section includes some additional figures based on the Hecht & Jamison results in order to emphasize some of these points. The third presents some modest extrapolations of the analyses in the assessment paper to note other important considerations and tradeoffs that might be relevant to evaluating the economic attractiveness of investments for development of HIV vaccines, including a brief sketch of how vaccines might be compared to other options for research and development on new tools against HIV/AIDS.

A Perspective Paper has been written by Joshua Salomon, Associate Professor of International Health, Department of Global Health and Population at Harvard University, wrote a Perspective Paper on Vaccine Research for Rethink HIV.