On the last Saturday in October around 100 people gathered in a ballroom at the Radisson on East Huron for a $100-a-plate dinner with live jazz. The event was a benefit for the Georgia Doty Health Education Fund, a south-side organization founded by nonprofit executive Don Doty that works in prisons and low-income communities. Representatives from the state and local health departments were there, mayoral and gubernatorial proclamations attesting to the important work being done by the fund were read, and Father George Clements, whom someone called the “black pope,” gave an invocation. Then Samuel Evans walked onstage to accept one of the fund’s health pioneer of the year awards.
Evans says he was poring over back issues of a newspaper in 1995 when he came across an article that claimed two out of five black females in Washington, D.C., were HIV positive and the ratio was expected to rise to three out of five within seven years. He says he told his wife, who’d just given birth to their daughter, that something had to be done about AIDS and remembers her saying, “You’re the guy to do it.”
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Later that year, says Evans, he agreed to fund a research effort in China “out of pocket” and flew to Nanjing. “The Chinese gave me a wonderful feting,” he says. They shuttled him from the airport in a limo, took him to a five-star hotel, and laid out an 18-course meal in his honor. “There were 200 people waiting to have dinner with me,” he told the audience at the Doty fund-raiser. “It was just like a movie!”
Evans says that before he went to China he approached pharmaceutical companies in the U.S. and Europe to see if they’d be interested in doing research on an HIV microbicide. “They had no interest in prevention,” he says. “There’s a great deal of money in treatment.” He also says that at the time the idea of a microbicide wasn’t being “bandied about.”
Two years later the NIH agreed to pump $1.5 million into microbicide research, and the secretary of Health and Human Services, Donna Shalala, announced a plan to spend another $100 million. By the time Evans went to China, the NIH, FDA, Centers for Disease Control, World Health Organization, UK Medical Research Council, and a host of nongovernmental organizations and research institutes were all working to develop microbicides.
But Evans says Genvia was tested further on 100 people at Gulou Hospital in Nanjing for about a year, adding, “I don’t absolutely know whether that one year was 10 months or 12 months.” He also says that in 2000 he received a certificate from the Chinese Academy of Medicine stating that Genvia had “passed all standards” for use as a “topically applied disinfectant” effective against HIV. He plans to post the test data on a Web site so other researchers can scrutinize it, but the AIDS Foundation’s Jim Pickett doesn’t understand why Evans has waited six years. “With a valid trial you want that data out there,” he says. “You’re dying to get it out there.”
Four of the microbicides being developed in the U.S. and the UK, which has standards similar to the FDA’s, are now in late-stage trials that will last three to four years. Testing is being done largely in Africa and Southeast Asia, in countries where HIV infections are contracted primarily through sex rather than needles. To get meaningful data, the researchers recruited 2,000 to 9,700 participants for each of the trials.
