Mintaka Foundation gains cash for anti-HIV trial

England's biggest charity is backing a bid by a Geneva research team - involving expat British scientists - to create a revolutionary anti-AIDS medicine for women and girls in poor countries.

The Mintaka Foundation, attached to the University of Geneva, said on Thursday it was awarded 4.5-million francs by the London-based Wellcome Trust.

The grant will allow the foundation to conduct a safety trial on a protein that can be produced as cheaply as beer, Robin Offord, the foundation’s executive director, told Swisster.

The protein, a microbicide known as 5P12-RANTES, has proved both in the test-tube and in experiments with monkeys conducted in the United States to be extremely effective at combating HIV, the AIDS virus, he said.

The Wellcome Trust grant will allow the Mintaka Foundation to get the “necessary ethical and government approval” before the product can be tested in the field, said Offord, a microbiologist who taught at Oxford and Cambridge universities before transferring to the University of Geneva in 1980.

Now an emeritus professor, he directs a foundation that also involves Oliver Hartley, a British expat biochemist and professor in the university’s faculty of medicine, who serves as the foundation’s chief scientific officer.

Offord, Hartley and Amos Bairoch, a departmental director at the University of Geneva's faculty of medicine, jointly founded Mintaka five years ago.

Every year more than two million people become infected with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa, where more than half the victims are women and girls and where condom use, for various reasons, is low.

Mintaka said its microbicide can address this problem through use in a gel or cream that can be applied to the genital area before sex to prevent infection.

The aim of the foundation is to make doses available at the price of a cigarette, to promote the wide use of the anti-HIV protein, Offord said.

Other less potent microbicides have emerged, “but all the results have been disappointing,” he said.

“What we preferred was to take our time,” Offord said. “We designed something to hit the virus hard, one of the most powerful anti-HIV substances known.”

Initially, the problem was that creating such a substance was “incredibly expensive,” he said.

But then researchers, in association with scientists in the US and France, developed 5P12-RANTES, which can be produced cheaply through microbial fermentation.

The latest funding follows grants that Mintaka has received from the Swiss, US and Swedish governments, as well as private foundations.

The first safety trials will be conducted within about a year on women volunteers in Geneva, he said.

But this is just another step in a long process to bring the HIV medicine to consumers.

Offord said it will take another six years before the microbicide can undergo clinical tests in Africa, where several countries have already shown interest in the substance.

And he estimated it would cost 50 million francs to bring the product to market, a process that would involve biotech companies to actually produce the substance.

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