HIV VACCINE

Found this very interesting there is now a vaccine in use for HIV Prevention

Thailand to host more studies for Aids vaccine

NEW HOPE FOR HIV PREVENTION

• Published: 3/10/2010 at 12:00 AM
• Newspaper section: News

ATLANTA : Further Aids vaccine studies will be carried out in Thailand after a recent large-scale clinical trial for the first time offered hope for HIV prevention by vaccination.

Researchers are planning to conduct small-scale experiments as early as the middle of next year to carry on from the work conducted in the original RV305 trial.

"We're trying to learn as much as possible from the result of the recent vaccine trial and the follow-up studies," said Supachai Rerks-Ngarm, principal investigator of the Phase III HIV/Aids vaccine project.

About 160 volunteers, who participated in a vaccine trial from 2003 to 2006, will be called in for the new tests, which are being conducted by the Public Health Ministry, Mahidol University's department of clinical tropical medicine and the US military's HIV research programme.

An efficacy trial was conducted for "prime-boost" vaccine combinations starting in October 2003. Some 16,000 volunteers in Chon Buri and Rayong participated in the study.

The results, released in September of last year, showed that the vaccinations had a 31.2% efficacy rate in preventing HIV after the three-year monitoring period.

Dr Supachai said the prime-boost shots _ Alvac, created by France's Sanofi Pasteur, and Aidsvax B/E, made by Global Solutions for Infectious Disease _ would be administered again to volunteers during the follow-up study.

Each volunteer would receive two shots of either the vaccine or a placebo over a six-month period.

Their symptoms would be monitored for another year and a half to determine if the shots boosted the body's immune response beyond the levels recorded after the previous vaccination.

In Thailand, the HIV transmission rate among men who have sex with other men increased from 17.3% of new Aids diagnoses in 2003 to about 30% in 2008.

Katherine Kripke, assistant director of the US National Institutes of Health's vaccine research programme, said during the recent Aids vaccine meeting on HIV research that follow-up studies such as this would help scientists develop a vaccine before conducting a larger and more comprehensive trial.

The Global HIV Vaccine Enterprise announced its strategic plan to speed up and enhance HIV vaccine research during the conference.

Alan Bernstein, executive director of the enterprise, said the new plan included recommendations to speed up the development, execution and analysis of HIV vaccine trials.

It was aimed at integrating pre-clinical and clinical research, capitalising on scientific advances from other fields and bringing in new researchers and supporters to fund HIV vaccine research.