Aids Vaccine

World AIDS Day today is an opportunity to bow our heads in remembrance of the more than 25 million men, women and children who have died of HIV/AIDS. It also is a chance to renew our resolve to end this deadly scourge. More than two decades after experts first recognized the threat posed by this disease, 40 million people worldwide - a nearly incomprehensible number - are living with HIV/AIDS, and 14,000 people are newly infected with HIV each day. To beat back this modern plague, we must collectively recommit ourselves to global efforts to care for HIV-infected individuals and their families and to redouble our efforts in HIV prevention.

Too soon to drop AIDS vaccine effort Rarely does one see in the editorial pages of an esteemed newspaper the kind of anti-science mentality displayed in the column The Sun published from two leaders of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation ("Enough is enough," Commentary, March 23). They argued that because scientists have not yet made an AIDS vaccine after 20 years of trying, and it may take another 10 years or more to do so, all funding for AIDS vaccine research should stop. That is stupefying logic.

BETHESDA -- Dr. David Baltimore, a Nobel laureate microbiologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will lead an effort to revitalize the nation's drive to develop an AIDS vaccine, the National Institutes of Health announced yesterday.Dr. William Paul, director of the Federal Office of AIDS Research at the institutes, said Baltimore would be the chairman of a committee charged with looking for new ideas for such development, reinvigorating research that after more than a decade has failed to produce an effective immunization against the disease.

To control AIDS, funding must be invested in strategies that work: effective prevention efforts, routine testing and universal access to treatment - and not spent on expensive vaccine research that over 20 years has yielded little of promise other than discovering how not to make an AIDS vaccine. The latest round of vaccine trial failures (including a large-scale Merck trial halted when the vaccine turned out to have possibly increased subjects' risk of acquiring HIV) has added to a growing consensus in the scientific community that an AIDS vaccine is a decade or more away, if one can be developed at all. Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, recently stated: "We have to leave open the possibility ... that we might never get a vaccine for HIV."

FLORENCE, Italy -- The number of crucial immune-system cells in a man with AIDS has doubled in the three months since he received a bone-marrow transplant from his healthy brother, who had been given an experimental AIDS vaccine to boost his immune system, researchers at the U.S. National Institutes of Health said yesterday.Described for the first time at yesterday's session of the Seventh International Conference on AIDS, the procedure was one of several exotic approaches to treatment outlined at a meeting that has seen no announcements of major treatment advances.

Software mogul Bill Gates pledged yesterday to donate $25 million over five years to help develop a vaccine against AIDS, an effort for which President Clinton has set a 2007 deadline but which has shown slow progress to date.Through his $5.2 billion charitable foundation, Gates, the Microsoft founder, will more than double the yearly budget of the nonprofit International Aids Vaccine Initiative of New York.Gates has pledged $100 million for improving access to vaccines among Third World children.

WITH HIS call for the development of an AIDS vaccine within 10 years, President Clinton used his visit to Morgan State University last weekend to focus attention on a challenge that has so far eluded medical researchers. The failure to find a vaccine contrasts sharply with recent advances in treatments that have allowed many people with AIDS to regain good health.Researchers welcomed the president's challenge; as Dr. Robert Gallo of the University of Maryland's Institute for Human Virology noted, "American society tends to respond to a crusade when given a goal."

Researchers at Baltimore's Institute of Human Virology have announced plans to begin human tests of an oral AIDS vaccine that they say would be cheaper and easier to administer than injectable vaccines now being tried. Testing of a vaccine for the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which causes AIDS, should begin within 18 months. Testing will be done on volunteers in Baltimore and in Uganda, one of the many African nations ravaged by the fatal disease. The first trial will determine whether the vaccine is safe, and could give way to further studies measuring effectiveness.

A decade ago, says the Rev. Welcome Khumalo, a Methodist minister from South Africa, many skeptical Africans thought of AIDS as "an American idea to prevent sex."Today, in his district of 20,000 people in the province of KwaZulu Natal on the Indian Ocean, he and his fellow clergy preside at funerals of young AIDS victims nearly every day.An average of one person per household is infected with HIV, including 29 percent of pregnant women."It's a monster that swallows young and old, rich and poor," Khumalo told a gathering of AIDS experts yesterday at Morgan State University.

Scientific advances, increased federal money for research, and Third World countries finally waking up to the fact that AIDS has ravaged their populations is creating optimism for a milestone that could save millions: a vaccine for the deadly AIDS virus.Just two years ago, when President Clinton pledged to Morgan State University graduates that scientists would find a vaccine for AIDS within a decade, there was plenty of cynicism. Today, there is much less."It is possible that the components for a reasonably successful vaccine are almost there, in our hands, but we don't know it yet," said Dr. Robert C. Gallo, co-discoverer of the AIDS virus.

The failure of Merck & Co.'s once-promising AIDS vaccine has cast a pall over research efforts and forced delays in trials of other experimental vaccines as scientists ponder what went wrong. After more than two decades of work, vaccine researchers were hoping to be further along. Even if other vaccine initiatives eventually succeed, the arduous process of development and testing means that there won't be an immunization to prevent HIV for at least another decade, one top federal researcher says.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded $15 million to Baltimore AIDS researchers hoping to develop a vaccine that will protect people against most of the viral strains circulating worldwide. The grant goes to the University of Maryland's Institute of Human Virology, headed by Dr. Robert Gallo, the co-discoverer of the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS. Gallo said yesterday that the vaccine is designed to overcome the virus' ability to mutate constantly - a hurdle that has frustrated researchers for more than two decades.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced yesterday a $287 million donation to fund AIDS vaccine research and establish an international network focused on vaccine development. The main goal of the 16 individual grants is to shift the development process from independent efforts in separate laboratories to large-scale collaborative efforts stretching across many labs and countries. "Traditional ways of making vaccines, which have worked well against other diseases, have largely failed for HIV," said Dr. Giuseppe Pantaleo of the University Hospital Center of Vaudois in Lausanne, Switzerland, one of the grantees.

World AIDS Day today is an opportunity to bow our heads in remembrance of the more than 25 million men, women and children who have died of HIV/AIDS. It also is a chance to renew our resolve to end this deadly scourge. More than two decades after experts first recognized the threat posed by this disease, 40 million people worldwide - a nearly incomprehensible number - are living with HIV/AIDS, and 14,000 people are newly infected with HIV each day. To beat back this modern plague, we must collectively recommit ourselves to global efforts to care for HIV-infected individuals and their families and to redouble our efforts in HIV prevention.

WASHINGTON - The Army and the National Institutes of Health are continuing with a $119 million AIDS vaccine experiment, even though some of the country's best-known HIV researchers say it likely won't work. Since September, about 500 high-risk individuals in Thailand have agreed to take a vaccine designed to stimulate the human immune system to attack the AIDS virus on two fronts. Researchers plan to give the shot to 15,500 more people over the next two years. There appears to be no question whether the vaccine is safe.

Top researchers expressed caution yesterday over a report that an experimental AIDS vaccine appeared to protect African-Americans against infection but not the broader population. "We need to be really cautious about interpreting data on race and ethnicity," said Dr. Donald Burke, who heads vaccine research at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, which took part in the vaccine trial. Factors other than race might explain why infection rates were much lower among vaccinated black people, Burke said.

WASHINGTON - The Army and the National Institutes of Health are continuing with a $119 million AIDS vaccine experiment, even though some of the country's best-known HIV researchers say it likely won't work. Since September, about 500 high-risk individuals in Thailand have agreed to take a vaccine designed to stimulate the human immune system to attack the AIDS virus on two fronts. Researchers plan to give the shot to 15,500 more people over the next two years. There appears to be no question whether the vaccine is safe.

Many of the world's AIDS research scientists met last week in South Africa, a country that has one of the greatest rates of spread of the disease in the last few years. While these scientists heard many papers and debated many issues, what they did not hear in Durban was exciting news about an AIDS vaccine -- the only way to stop the spread of AIDS. Vaccines against viruses can produce miracles -- smallpox was eradicated from the world with a vaccine and polio is almost eradicated. Yet so far no anti-HIV vaccine has been produced.

Once bitter rivals, two of the world's best-known AIDS researchers shook hands and formed a partnership yesterday to try to raise millions of dollars and conduct AIDS vaccine trials. Dr. Luc Montagnier, whose lab in Paris discovered the virus that causes AIDS in 1983, and Dr. Robert Gallo, a former competitor who helped to develop a blood test for the disease, hope to test five potential AIDS vaccines in Baltimore, Africa and elsewhere. During a news conference at the State House in Annapolis, Gallo said that Montagnier would become an adjunct professor at Gallo's Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore.

Many of the world's AIDS research scientists met last week in South Africa, a country that has one of the greatest rates of spread of the disease in the last few years. While these scientists heard many papers and debated many issues, what they did not hear in Durban was exciting news about an AIDS vaccine -- the only way to stop the spread of AIDS. Vaccines against viruses can produce miracles -- smallpox was eradicated from the world with a vaccine and polio is almost eradicated. Yet so far no anti-HIV vaccine has been produced.