Researchers Optimistic About an AIDS Vaccine ... Eventually

Researchers, World Health Organization officials, government officials and representatives of non-governmental organizations gathered in New York yesterday for the four-day AIDS Vaccine 2003 Conference. The conference, held every two years, gathers experts from approximately 50 countries to deliver the results of about 500 studies on preventive and therapeutic HIV test vaccines.

Norman Letvin, an AIDS expert from Harvard Medical School, said that scientists need to know more in order to create an antibody response to vaccination that will recognize and neutralize HIV. "We need a more profound understanding of how the envelope of the virus looks to the antibodies," he said.

Research on the antibodies neutralizing HIV is still at an early stage, making the development of a preventive vaccine unlikely any time soon. However, researchers have some hopes of developing a therapeutic vaccine. "There is a great deal of optimism about vaccine strategies aiming at eliciting T cell responses to the viruses," Letvin commented. "If we can induce killer T cells through vaccination, infected people would have a much slower disease progression."

Margaret Johnston, who leads the AIDS division at the National Institutes of Health, stated that the pipeline for new vaccine candidates "has expanded considerably. Human trials are a necessity; we don't have any valid animal model."

Researchers from developing countries, such as Salim Karim from the University of Natal, Durban, South Africa, discussed ongoing research in their nations, where transmission conditions for the disease differ from those in industrialized countries. Karim told the delegates that 24,000 South Africans would become infected with HIV during the conference.

WHO's Jose Esparza noted that 44 million people worldwide are HIV-infected, 90 percent of them in developing countries. The meeting comes three months after a June 24 call by prominent researchers, Noble prize winners and leading health sector figures to step up efforts to find an AIDS vaccine to prevent 45 million new infections by 2010 and to keep 70 million people from dying by 2020.

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