Bangkok, September 24: An experimental AIDS vaccine has for the first time cut the risk of infection, researchers said Thursday, hailing at a medical “breakthrough” in the quarter-century battle against the disease.
The vaccine reduced the risk of being infected by almost a third, they said after the world’s largest vaccine trial of more than 16,000 heterosexual volunteers carried out by the U.S. Army and the Thailand Ministry of Public Health.
” It is the first demonstration that a vaccine against HIV can protect against infection ”
Dr. Jerome Kim
“This is a very important scientific advance and gives us hope that a globally effective vaccine may be possible in the future,” Dr. Jerome Kim, a U.S. Army colonel at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Maryland, who helped lead the trial, told a news conference in Bangkok.
“It is the first demonstration that a vaccine against HIV can protect against infection,” he said via videolink.
Vaccine breakthrough
The vaccine was effectively a combination of two older vaccines that had not cut infection on their own. It was tested on volunteers at average risk of HIV infection in two Thai provinces near Bangkok starting in October 2003.
“The outcome represents a breakthrough in HIV vaccine development because for the first time ever there is evidence that HIV vaccine has preventative efficacy,” said a statement released by the researchers at a press conference in Bangkok.
Unexpected results
” But nonetheless, we went ahead with the trial and it was controversial to go ahead with ”
Dr. Anthony Fauci
The result, almost completely unexpected, puzzled researchers, who say they cannot figure out why the vaccine combination is working.
It is also a triumph for its supporters, who went ahead with the giant trial of 16,000 volunteers despite critics who said it was unethical or a waste of money because the vaccine was so widely expected to have no effect at all.
“Myself, like others, did not think there was a very high chance that this would give any degree of efficacy,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which helped pay for the study.
“But nonetheless, we went ahead with the trial and it was controversial to go ahead with it,” he said.
Kim stressed that the vaccine may not work in the people and places where HIV is most common — in Africa, among men who have sex with men and among injecting drug users.
Fauci and Kim said the vaccine was formulated specifically to work against two subtypes of the human immunodeficiency virus — E, which circulates in Thailand and Southeast Asia, and B, which is common in the United States and Europe.
About 27,000 people died of AIDS in the Middle East in 2007, and another half a million people in the region were living with HIV, according to the United Nations.
–Agencies