Support For AIDS Vaccine Falters
On the eve of an NIH summit devoted to AIDS vaccine research, a once-promising study of an AIDS vaccine will be scaled back and may be scrubbed after the failure of a related Merck effort, Bloomberg News writes. The vaccine, created by the NIH, may be studied in about only 2,000 people in the US and Africa, rather than 8,500 as had been planned.
The International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, which helped bring six vaccines to human testing, will announce today it has pulled out of the trial. Support has dropped for studies of existing experimental AIDS vaccines since September, when Merck announced its shot may have made people more vulnerable to infection. AIDS researchers say concern was further heightened after a second test of Merck’s product, conducted in South Africa, also found this month more infections among those vaccinated.
“There isn’t a clear understanding of why,” Wayne Koff, IAVI’s senior vp R&D, tells Bloomberg. “I think we have a safety unknown here.”
Meanwhile, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, the largest US non-profit HIV/AIDS organization, is calling for a moratorium on funding research into an AIDS vaccine. In an editorial yesterday in The Baltimore Sun entitled “Enough Is Enough,” the group wrote that “suspending US funding for an HIV vaccine and investing in strategies that save lives and stop new infections is the wisest and most effective use of limited public resources. And with thousands of lives lost daily because people around the world lack access to proven, effective and relatively inexpensive prevention and treatment options, it is also the only moral choice.”
Heinz Kohler
We have predicted these Vaccine failures and called for a moratorium of all Vaccine trials ongoing and planned.(Vaccine. 2003 Sep 8;21(25-26):3528-9).
We have argued that these failures are caused by “Deceptive Imprinting” (Immunol Today. 1994 Oct;15(10):475-8) of the immune system, a combination of a strong immune response, producing an “Original Antigenic sin” effect and the ability of the virus to mutate.
(see Int Rev Immunol. 2004 Sep-Dec;23(5-6):369-81.)
A hallmark of Deceptive Imprinting is the persistence of clonally restricted immune response in infected individuals at the B and T-cell against viral antigens.
I urge that the vaccine failure volunteers in the trials to be tested for such restricted immune responses. This would confirm our prediction of the cause of vaccine failure.
Heinz Kohler