TAG’s annual Pipeline Report surveys the developments in medicines and diagnostics most likely to
improve the lives of people living with HIV, viral hepatitis, and tuberculosis
within the next few years. But in spotlighting what is in the pipeline, the report
also identifies critical gaps where research is falling short of the need for
better tools to manage these diseases.
From the Introduction by Mark Harrington:
This year’s Pipeline report shows, in brief, a lull in
anti-HIV drug development, an alarming stasis in hepatitis B treatment
research, renewed activity (after a gap of almost 40 years) in TB drug
development, agonizing slow and incremental progress in TB diagnostics
research, very preliminary human studies of several new TB vaccine candidates,
a back-to-basics mood in the HIV vaccine research community, renewed hopes for
efficacy in microbicide and pre-exposure prophylaxis, and no dramatic
developments in the areas of immune-based therapies or therapeutic vaccines for
HIV.
In short, as Thomas Kuhn would have said, this report
documents a period of relatively “normal” science, with its incremental steps
forward and back, its halting progress, its occasional retreat from a blind
alley. There is nothing as dramatic here as the bleak pessimism that enshrouded
HIV vaccine research after the STEP study was prematurely terminated in 2007,
nor the possibly overhyped HAART 2.0 breakthrough of that same year, when two
new classes of anti-HIV drugs were introduced. Yet, as Richard Jefferys points
out in the conclusion to his chapter herein, the despair of Berlin 1993
preceded the euphoria of the HAART revolution of Vancouver 1996 by just three
years. We do not have a crystal ball; nor do we know whence the next
breakthrough may come.