SMALL VICTORIES:
The massive Thai AIDS trial has raised optimism, even though the vaccines had only slight—if any—protective value.
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The long search for an AIDS vaccine has produced countless false starts and repeated failed trials, casting once bright hopes into shadows of disenchantment. The now familiar swings appeared in high relief last fall, with news of the most recent, phase III trial in Thailand. Initial fanfare for a protective outcome gave way to disappointment after reanalysis showed that the protection could be attributed only to chance. But rather than dashing all hopes for an AIDS vaccine, the trial has heartened some researchers, who see new clues in the battle against the fatal illness.
Costing $105 million and enrolling more than 16,000 subjects, the Thai clinical trial was the largest AIDS vaccine test to date. It began in 2003, and early results released last September showed a slim but statistically sound benefit from the vaccine (a series of inoculations with drugs known as ALVAC-HIV and AIDSVAX B/E). But in October the full report, with various statistical analyses, was released in a Paris meeting to greater skepticism. Specifically, 74 people who had received the placebo became infected with HIV in the trial period, compared with the 51 people who became infected after receiving the vaccine, which makes for a protective effect of 31.2 percent. By including, however, the seven people who turned out to have had HIV at the start of the trial (two in the placebo group and five in the vaccine group), the effectiveness drops to 26.4 percent.
“There are still a huge number of uncertainties surrounding this trial,” says Dennis Burton, an immunologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif. The subjects were in low- and moderate-risk groups, such as heterosexuals in monogamous relationships, rather than higher-risk groups such as intravenous drug users. “The numbers involved are small,” he adds, noting that statistically the protective effects could be the result of mere chance.
Still, many researchers are convinced that the trial has provided plenty of data to run with. “This contributes more evidence that an AIDS vaccine may be possible,” says Jerome Kim of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and co-author of the Thai trial study (which appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine in October). “We’ve taken a very small step,” Kim says. “It’s not a home run, but it opens the door to future work.” Vaccine proponents also point to the lessons learned from the failed Merck STEP trial. That vaccine test, halted in 2007, got only as far as phase II, but even so it did not leave researchers back at square one. It suggested, he notes, how some HIV strains could be blocked from infecting cells and offered data that could help in the interpretation of the Thai results. And a new analysis of the STEP trial, published last November in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, provides a warning that the very vectors (adenoviruses, which are also employed in other vaccine development work) used to distribute the inactive HIV strains can actually make the immune system more vulnerable to infection by recruiting susceptible T cells to mucous membranes, where they are more likely to be infected during sexual activity.
Finding a vaccine has become an increasingly urgent undertaking. Despite advances in therapies, HIV/AIDS is still incurable. Some 7,000 people worldwide contract HIV every day, and in the U.S. about 66,000 new cases are reported every year. Preventing people from getting the virus would save millions of lives as well as greatly reduce health care costs associated with treatment. A vaccine is “really the only optimal method of control for this dreadful pandemic,” says Raphael Dolin of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, who also wrote an editorial accompanying the October paper.
Vaccines work by priming the immune system to recognize the target pathogen and attack it when detected. To fend off HIV, researchers introduced one vaccine (ALVAC) to induce a T cell response—thereby alerting the immune system—and another (AIDSVAX) later to spur an antibody response. In a previous phase III trial in intravenous drug users, AIDSVAX did not work. ALVAC, made by Sanofi Pasteur, had not been tested alone.
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Add CommentView the new documentary "House of Numbers" to see why questions about this must be raised and deeper issues about HIV and AIDS need to be discussed. Lives are at risk, and this is the first documentary with the worlds foremost authorities highlights the scientific problems with HIV testing, science, statistics, and why there is no cure. It sheds new light on a misunderstood phenomena. GO to http://houseofnumbers.com/ to see the trailer.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTruth about AIDS as told by Dr. Luc Montagnier. AIDS can be reversed. Nutrition is the answer. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQoNW7lOnT4
@dsinla: We have just buried the Mother of Nutrition - Manto shabalala-Msimang, our former and unlamented Minsiter of Health - who stressed nutrition as an answer to AIDS: she was wrong, and you are too.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisVaccines and prevention are the answer: while nutrition may help, it does ONLY that.
Has there been any trials in the US? While my brother was in college, he paid room and board by being a human lab rat. I remember him talking about how he had gone through a trial and then tested HIV positive, when there was no chance that he actually had HIV. Was this a trial for a vaccine or a fluke?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDear kat17, I'm interested to know more about your brother's status. How is he today? I'm in the states and will be 5 yrs positive this August.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's been 3 or 4 years and he is still showing up positive. He seems to have no adverse side affects, other then testing positive for HIV.
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Call or visit your healthcare providers at Local STD Testing Clinics right away if you feel that you are infected by any sexually transmitted diseases.
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