Research on AIDS vaccine to Continue but Human Testing will be avoided

The failure of a potential AIDS vaccine has left the researchers in dismay leading to an apprehension in continuing with clinical trials of experimental vaccines on humans. Following long debates on the issue, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health's Allergy and a leading voice for AIDS said that, despite all failures, the government will renew commitment to the development of a drug to prevent the wasting disease.

"We will not discontinue research, period. Not only will we not decrease it, we will in fact try to increase it," he said.

Dr. Fauci added, “A drug or a vaccine or a diagnostic, is a natural evolution of the path towards a vaccine.”

A meeting was recently held in Bethesda with the intention of bringing together the scientists after last year’s disappointment when Merck & Co. announced that it had halted tests of an important vaccine candidate in September. After almost a decade and millions of dollars in development, it was determined in two clinical trials that the drug not only failed to protect people against AIDS - but might actually have increased their risk of infection.

“The HIV vaccine field is clearly at a critical crossroads, and decisions about our future course will affect the lives of billions of individuals in both research-rich and resource-poor settings for years to com,” said Dr. Warner C. Greene, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco who was also the co-chaired the meeting.

While many of the experts agreed that clinical studies should continue, others recommended reducing the dependence on human trials. Dr. Anthony Fauci and others suggest supplementing human trials with increased drug trials on animals, specifically lower primates.

“There is good discovery research that you can get out of an animal model, just as there's good discovery research that you can get out of clinical research,” said Dr. Fauci.

Although the fatal infection has been transformed into chronic disease for many patients, the repeated failures at vaccination attempts have made it difficult to pull in donations and funds for the research.