January 30, 2000
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The opening two talks at the Retrovirus Conference, in San Francisco, reviewed "Our Retroviral Heritage," and "The State of HIV Vaccine Research." Robin Weiss, from London, compared animal retroviruses with HIV-1, the virus that causes AIDS in people. He expressed some concerns about the risk of future transmission of animal viruses to people, where they may become more aggressive. He also reminded people that the United Nations currently estimates that there are 33.6 million people in the world are infected with HIV!
Dr. Gary Nabel, the director of the new NIH Vaccine Research Center, reviewed the current state of vaccine development. There are three classes of HIV vaccines: live viruses (live-attenuated); vaccines which generate antibodies to HIV; and vaccines which stimulate cellular immunity, or T-cells, which can kill HIV-infected cells. There are, or have been, a total of seventy phase I, five phase II, and two ongoing phase III HIV vaccine trials. Probably the most exciting class of new vaccines are those that generate cellular immunity, as they have the potential to eliminate the latently infected-cells, which are the source of HIV rebound when antiretroviral therapy is stopped. However, Dr. Nabel outlined some large, still unanswered, questions about how long lasting cellular immunity might be, and if HIV will be able to become resistant to them, as it does to the antibody-generating vaccines.
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