Aids Vaccine

A step toward developing the first oral AIDS vaccine was taken yesterday at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, as a volunteer gulped two cups of liquid. One held a buffer to neutralize his stomach acids; the other a solution designed by United Biomedical Inc. of Hauppauge, N.Y.The trial, funded by the National Institutes of Health, is small: Thirty volunteers, at Hopkins and the University of Rochester, will receive either the vaccine or a placebo. Volunteers are still needed.The study will gauge the side effects of the vaccine.

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.

Army researchers say an experimental AIDS vaccine has triggered an immune response in patients who already carried the virus -- a hopeful sign that a vaccine may someday be LTC capable of prolonging lives.The scientists, reporting in today's New England Journal of Medicine, said that 19 of 30 volunteers who received injections of the vaccine showed an increase in antibodies and white blood cells that are components of the body's arsenal against infection.In addition, the vaccine caused no serious side effects during 10 months of observation.

WASHINGTON -- The National Institutes of Health announced yesterday that it was ready to begin tests of AIDS vaccines in people at high risk to get the disease.The trials will take place at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Immunization in Baltimore, the St. Louis University School of Medicine, the University of Rochester (N.Y.) Medical Center, Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, and the University of Washington in Seattle.The experiment will be on a small scale, with two vaccines being given to 320 patients at the five sites.

So far, there still is no vaccine that can protect against AIDS. One reason, scientists say, is because of the unusual way HIV attacks a cell, binding to its target site at an odd place that allows it to escape the wrath of the antibodies that typically scrub the blood of dangerous invaders. Another reason is HIV's protein "coat," which seems capable of changing its chemical composition and disguising HIV's true nature from immune responses. But as tricky as it is, the human immunodeficiency virus is bound to be susceptible to some kind of attack by the immune system.

Cautioning that the final answer may be years away, scientists in Baltimore say they have made significant but "incremental" progress toward a vaccine that could protect people against the virus that causes AIDS.Researchers with the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health said yesterday that an experimental vaccine given to 20 human volunteers caused the majority to produce "neutralizing antibodies" -- proteins that keep the free-floating virus from infecting healthy cells.The results, published in this week's issue of The Lancet, a British medical journal, were noticed when blood samples taken from vaccinated people were mixed in test tubes with samples of the AIDS virus.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Dr. David Baltimore, the Nobel laureate who heads a government advisory committee on AIDS vaccine research, said yesterday that President Clinton's 10-year deadline for an effective AIDS vaccine may be only partly reachable.Speaking to a conference of science writers, Baltimore said that 10 years may be enough to develop a promising candidate that can then be tested on thousands of people -- the sprawling field trials that are the ultimate test of a vaccine's worth.Such trials are immensely complicated and take several years to complete, he said, so the public should not expect an approved product that can be used on a widespread basis by the year 2007.

FLORENCE, Italy -- Participants were jubilant on the eve of last year's International Conference on AIDS. For the first time, it seemed possible to develop a human vaccine against the epidemic because immunized animals had been protected against the AIDS virus.As scientists gather today for this year's conference on acquired immune deficiency syndrome, the mood is still upbeat but tempered by obstacles to making a completely preventive vaccine useful under conditions in the field."What we've learned in the last year, 80 percent to 90 percent, has really increased our optimism," said Dr. Wayne Koff, head of the AIDS vaccine development for the National Institutes of Health.

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.

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.