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365Gay.com
25 Years After
Discovery Of HIV, Search
For Vaccine Goes On
by The Canadian Press
from the Web, May 12, 2008
Toronto, Ontario, May 9 -- The
despair that set in after the failure of the latest effort to develop an AIDS
vaccine has given way to a renewed determination on the part of the scientific
community, says the Canadian scientist leading an international effort to
maximize global activity in the field.
As the world gets ready to mark the 25th anniversary of the publication of the
scientific paper announcing the discovery of the virus that causes AIDS, there
is a consensus that more, not less, human research is needed in pursuit of the
quest, Dr. Alan Bernstein said in an interview Thursday.
Bernstein, who is executive director of the Global HIV Vaccine Enterprise, said
he remains hopeful success can be built upon the lessons learned from the
failure of the STEP trial and other efforts to date.
"Our genome ... is three billion bases (base pairs) of DNA. This virus is
about 10 million bases of DNA. We're a lot smarter than this virus," he
said.
"So I am an optimist. I think you have to be as a scientist."
"I could not guarantee that one day we'll have a vaccine. But not to try
is to say to all the 33 million people who are infected with the virus and the
2.3 million who are becoming infected with the virus every year: 'We're
giving up.' "
May 20 marks the 25th anniversary of the publication in the journal Science of a
report from Dr. Luc Montagnier and colleagues of La Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital
and the Institute Pasteur in Paris that they had discovered what they believed
to be the cause of the mysterious and alarming disease known as AIDS.
"A retrovirus belonging to the family of recently discovered human T-cell
leukemia viruses (HTLV), but clearly distinct from each previous isolate, has
been isolated from a Caucasian patient with signs and symptoms that often
precede the acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS)," their historic
submission began.
Montagnier and his colleagues named the newly discovered pathogen
lymphadenopathy-associated virus or LAV. But it was subsequently renamed the
human immunodeficiency virus or HIV.
To mark the anniversary of the publication, Science is publishing an editorial
by Bernstein in this week's issue, along with review papers discussing the
challenges facing the vaccine effort and a discussion of HIV prevention.
Those who argue the failure of the STEP trial and another, earlier trial are
evidence investment in HIV vaccine research is misplaced and the goal cannot be
reached "are misguided," wrote Bernstein, who last fall completed a seven-year
term as the first president of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
"The development of new drugs and new vaccines always takes time and is never a
straight line and it's always marked by failures," he explained.
"I think that's sort of just been the history of medicine. What the public
hears about, of course, is when there's a success. 'Oh, we have a new
vaccine. Fabulous.' But what you tend not to hear about are all the
dead ends and false starts and things that go wrong, by and large."
Much hope had been focused on the STEP trial, which tested a vaccine developed
by pharmaceutical giant Merck and Co. But last September the study was
abruptly halted after it became apparent the vaccine wasn't preventing
infection. It was later seen that participants who got the vaccine
actually went on to develop HIV at higher rates than those who got a placebo.
The announcement that Bernstein would head the new global enterprise was made a
few weeks after the announcement that the STEP trial had been shut down.
Rather than feeling deterred by that news, Bernstein said it reaffirmed for him
the need to up the effort.
"When the results came out, I had two reactions actually. One was I was as
disappointed as anybody in science about it. And on the other hand, it
just reaffirmed for me I had made the right decision to take this job."
In the intervening months, a number of scientific symposiums have been held to
try to figure out what went wrong with the Merck vaccine and chart a safe course
forward for HIV vaccine development.
What has emerged, Bernstein said, is a consensus that more basic and early stage
clinical research is needed so that science can figure out what happens when a
human is infected with the virus. Such work should also aim at filling in
some of the many gaps in understanding about how the human immune system works,
he said
That kind of work could help scientists figure out why asthma rates are rising
and how to develop an effective vaccine for malaria, he suggested.
"If we do the kinds of research that's needed to understand how we react to HIV,
that ultimately will inform a lot of research on other pathogens."
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