Friday, October 18, 2013

Terrific meeting today. Paul Stoffels, Chief Scientific Officer of Janssen research Foundation, part of Johnson & Johnson called me months ago asking to have a meeting since he wanted to support and develop the Ad26 vector – HIV mosaic insert vaccine candidate of Dan Barouch. I have always liked working with Paul since he is the real deal as an honest scientist and smart drug developer/businessman. He came in from Belgium with a team from Crucell company that was recently purchased by Following the visit to Larry I went back to my hotel which was the Hotel Excelsior on 81st St. between Columbus Avenue and Central Park West. The ceremony at the Museum of Natural History was stunning in the positive sense. I completely underestimated the importance of this particular function. The annual function makes three major awards to biotech companies, pharmaceutical companies, and companies that develop devices. It is essentially the Academy Awards of pharmaceutical/biotech companies. I gave the keynote address associated with my receiving the Pro Bono Humanum Award. This award is given every year. Over the past 3 years it has been won by Francis Collins, Paul Farmer, and Bill Clinton. The dinner gala was held in the Whale Room of the Museum of Natural History. All the elite of the biotech world, the pharmaceutical world, and the academic world were in the audience, which consisted of about 500 people I gave an address on “Ending the HIV/AIDS Pandemic: From Scientific Advances to Public Health Implementation. Importantly I was introduced and presented the award by Elie Wiesel. It was an extraordinary honor to receive the award by him. I returned to Washington DC first thing in the morning to a very busy week.