News :: GLBT
HIV Vaccine Trial Cancelledby Kilian MelloyFriday Jul 18, 2008 In the wake of the highly publicized failure of a promising vaccine to protect individuals from HIV, a new trial scheduled to test a HIV vaccine has been scrapped.
The decision, by director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci, marks the latest setback in the quarter-century-long quest to find a way to immunize individuals against the virus that causes AIDS.
The failed vaccine, developed by Merck, had been partly financed by the NIAID, and prior to its failure had been highly touted; the resilient virus’ ability to withstand the vaccine was seen by some as a watershed moment that called for a redistribution of funding in order to enhance other avenues of combating HIV/AIDS.
The decision to cancel the trial was made because Dr. Fauci believes that more basic research is required in order to understand the interaction between a vaccine designed to ward off HIV and the body’s natural defense against disease, reported The New York Times in a July 18 article.
The new vaccine had been designed to work with the body’s immune system, but last year’s failure of the Merck vaccine has made researchers more cautious and illustrated how poorly understood the virus is despite two and a half decades of intense scrutiny.
The decision also comes after a conference earlier this year in which leading AIDS researchers denounced the pursuit of a vaccine as taking resources away from other avenues of dealing with the AIDS epidemic, such as education and other measures aimed at prevention.
But Fauci has not given up on the new vaccine entirely; he wishes to test it more thoroughly on animals, and then try a smaller-scale human trial before launching another large human trial.
Said Fauci, "Show me that the vaccine works by lowering the amount of H.I.V. in the blood," the New York Times article reported.
"Then we will move to a larger trial that will document the link with a particular immune response."
At the present time, however, "doing a large trial is not justified," Fauci said.
More basic research and new ideas are still important, said the executive director of Global HIV Vaccine Enterprise, Dr. Alan Bernstein, who spoke of an "urgent need for a diversity of new approaches to H.I.V. vaccine design."
Technology is opening up just such new avenues for research, and new analytic techniques "offer immense promise in helping us understand how to design new HIV vaccine candidates that can achieve long-lasting immune protection," Bernstein said.
The now-cancelled trial had initially been delayed following the failure of the Merck vaccine, which had been designed to meet two major criteria: to protect uninfected individuals and prevent them from contracting HIV, and to lessen the viral load of individuals already living with the disease.
The Merck vaccine accomplished neither goal in human subjects, despite promising results in test animals. Furthermore, there was some indication that the vaccine may actually have made human test subjects more susceptible to the virus, rather than protecting them.
The Merck trial involved 3,000 human subjects in nine countries, and was quickly shut down last Sept. when a committee monitoring the safety of the vaccine determined that it was not working as hoped.
The New York Times article said that no one understands as yet just why the Merck vaccine failed.
The article also reported on a separate item, in which Duke University researchers reported a discovery that indicated that HIV might compromise the immune system more rapidly than previously thought, narrowing the window for meaningful post-exposure treatment from weeks to mere days.
The new research was reported in an article by Dr. Barton Hayes, et al, published in The Journal of Virology.
New approaches have been announced in recent months, including a theoretical treatment to use sound waves to "shatter" the virus, a new hypothesis that it may be possible to disrupt the virus’ ability to reproduce, and suggestions that future treatments might target receptor sites in human blood cells rather than going after the virus directly.
An article about naturally-occurring mutations that affect receptor sites on red and white blood cells, and the role those receptors play in HIV infection, appeared at EDGE on July 17.
Kilian Melloy reviews media, conducts interviews, and writes commentary for EDGEBoston, where he also serves as Assistant Arts Editor.
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