Kundai Chinyenze leads a global team working to create an HIV vaccine that will prevent the virus, prevent new infections and control the epidemic. A motivation that she awoke as a child when, given her interest in chemical engineering, her mother, a nurse, told her that she should study medicine. Something that it seems that she did not convince him, until one day, when she was 16 years old, her mother was admitted to a hospital in Zimbabwe, where she was able to hear from the nurses that her cause was HIV.
After losing her parents to AIDS, Chinyenze set out to learn all about HIV. Now 44, she leads a global team on a project called ADVANCE, aimed at accelerating the development of vaccines and new technologies to combat the AIDS epidemic. It is a cooperative that has been operating for 10 years under an agreement with the United States Agency for International Development through the Emergency Plan, as reported The Guardian.
Despite the advances, Kundai Chinyenze acknowledges the difficulties in finding a vaccine, since the body itself does not know how to recover from HIV, as he explains, “by not having a human recovery model, it is like teaching the body something that it has not discovered how to do it naturally. But, he points out, if we have learned anything from the speed with which the COVID-19 vaccine was created, it is that we are faster and arrive at solutions sooner when we remove barriers. Science can never be silent, it is necessary for scientists to challenge themselves and feed each other to find the best solutions to our problems.
