Professor treks in Africa for an AIDS fund-raiser
By Daily Bruin Staff
May 1, 2002 9:00 p.m.
Courtesy of Peter Anton Dr. Peter Anton trekked
across 75 miles of rugged terrain in Africa to raise money for AIDS
research last month.
By Sabrina Singhapattanapong
Daily Bruin Contributor
[email protected]
Imagine hiking 75 miles over the rugged rocks and boulders of
two South African mountain ranges in seven days, while enduring
“bitterly cold nights” among wild ants and baboons. Now
imagine a UCLA AIDS vaccine researcher doing just that.
Dr. Peter Anton, an associate professor of medicine specializing
in “gut” problems, joined 124 other
“trekkers” in April’s African AIDSTrek event to
raise funds for AIDS vaccine research.
With about 8,000 people dying from AIDS every day, Anton said
the motivation to raise money for AIDS research was triggered about
a decade ago, when he began losing friends and patients to
AIDS.
“People were dying just within weeks of finding out they
were positive and they’d just be wasting so quickly,”
Anton said.
“There were years I would just read the obituaries and
I’d pretty much know one or two people every week,” he
added.
Anton felt that he needed to actually see what it was that he
and his researchers were working so hard for. So he traveled to
Africa to participate in his third Pallotta TeamWorks AIDS vaccine
fund-raising event.
“I went to the towns and I went to the hospitals … and
clinics. Oh my God, it’s devastating to see the number of
people that don’t have meals each day … and have to watch
their babies die of AIDS,” Anton said.
Money raised through events like the African AIDSTrek takes
about three months to be channeled into researchers’ hands
compared to federal National Institutes of Health grants which take
up to two years, Anton said.
Anton raised more than $35,000 in the past two years for similar
AIDS vaccine events and “significantly more” from other
private donors, said Faith Landsman, administrative coordinator of
the UCLA AIDS Institute Vaccine Initiative.
Since federal NIH research grants are highly competitive and
slow, Anton said he relies heavily on private dollars to fund new
research efforts for AIDS vaccines.
NIH federal grants require researchers to submit preliminary
data which ensure that awarded grant money is utilized only for the
most promising research studies, Anton said. Problems arise when
researchers have new ideas but little money to prepare preliminary
data, Anton said.
Thus, private dollars that come in an “unrestricted
form” are like gold ““ enabling researchers to pursue
innovative ideas ““ while federal dollars are for more
established research projects, he added.
Money raised through the African AIDSTrek event is still being
calculated. However, half of the funds raised from this event will
be split between the UCLA AIDS Institute and the Emory Vaccine
Center, said Pallotta TeamWorks public relations coordinator Wylie
Tene.
Pallotta TeamWorks is a fund-raising corporation that has raised
more than $2.7 million for the UCLA AIDS Institute in the past two
years, Tene said.
Although Anton predicts that a cure for AIDS will not be
discovered in the near future, there is hope for some therapeutic
vaccines in the next five years ““ making fund-raising for
innovative AIDS vaccine ideas essential.
In August, Anton will be biking 400 miles from Montreal, Canada
to Portland, Maine to raise money for AIDS vaccine research. And
though he was named “worst feet of the (African AIDSTrek)
trip,” due to his badly blistered feet, the Canada-U.S. AIDS
Vaccine Ride is something he looks forward to doing.
“I love the (research) work, but I also don’t know
that there is any other thing we can be doing right now,”
Anton said. “If we don’t make a difference, it’s
going to be over.”
