Efficacy results of the current generation of AIDS vaccines due this year.

2003 JUL 16 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- by Maria G. Essig, MS, ELS, senior medical writer - Strategies for AIDS vaccines now undergoing clinical testing involve the optimization of antibody and cellular immune responses, according to a review published in a recent issue of Current Molecular Medicine.

"Twenty years after its recognition, HIV/AIDS has become the most important infectious disease globally and the leading cause of death in Africa," said Jose Esparza and Saladin Osmanov at the World Health Organization. "A preventive vaccine represents the best long-term hope for its control. The development of such a vaccine, however, has encountered a number of scientific challenges, including the lack of information on immune correlates of protection, the limitations in our understanding of the relevance of primate protection experiments in relation to vaccine-induced protection in humans, and the significance of genetic and immunologic variability of HIV strains for potential vaccine efficacy."

Esparza and Osmanov chronicle the development of AIDS vaccines from the first phase I clinical trial conducted in 1987 the United States. A trial in a developing country didn't occur until 6 years later in 1993.

"Since then more than 30 candidate vaccines have been tested in over 70 phase I/II clinical trials in both industrialized and developing countries," stated the researchers (HIV vaccines: A global perspective. Curr Mol Med, 2003;3(3):183-193).

Of those 70 clinical trials, ...