"To find high-risk gay men we need to go where they are," Jim Maynard, of Boston's Fenway Community Health center, said of his recent excursion to a popular gay bar's "leather night" to solicit volunteers for the HIV Vaccine Trial Network. HVTN is recruiting participants for a nationwide trial of two HIV candidate vaccines.

The biggest obstacle, say those involved, is overcoming potential volunteers' fear they will contract HIV from the vaccines. But the two candidates, known by their protocol numbers 502 and 204, do not contain live virus and so cannot cause AIDS.

"We hope this will trick the immune system into making a response to HIV that will bolster the immune system but not undermine it," said Kenneth Mayer, an infectious-disease physician and a lead researcher in the study. A successful vaccine would stimulate the immune system so that a person's system could later fight off the real virus. This is why recruiters are seeking sexually active, HIV-negative persons age 18 and older who would likely be exposed to the virus in the coming years.

Participants will receive three vaccine or placebo injections and be observed for about four years. If the placebo group has a higher rate of HIV infection than those who received 204 or 502, "that would be a big breakthrough, and this could look like a very promising vaccine," said Mayer.

For information on enrolling in the Boston area, contact Brigham and Women's Hospital at 617-525-7327 or vaccines@partners.org; or Fenway Community Health at 617-927-6450 or dleblanc@fenwayhealth.org; or Miriam Hospital in Providence at 401-793-4932. For more information on the national trial, visit www.hvtn.org.

Back to other news for November 30, 2005

Search the Newsroom archive