NIAID, Merck To Collaborate On HIV Vaccine Development.(Brief Article)

2002 JAN 16 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the leading HIV research component of the United States government, has entered into an agreement with Merck & Co. to collaborate on human testing of promising candidate HIV vaccines developed by the company.

Under an agreement signed December 20, 2001, the vaccines will be evaluated in collaboration with NIAID's international HIV Vaccine Trials Network (HVTN), a group of more than two dozen clinical sites worldwide established to rapidly move promising experimental HIV vaccines through all stages of human testing.

Merck will continue its ongoing HIV vaccine development program, which includes a number of independent trials that are under way or planned. Merck will also provide HVTN with certain proprietary scientific tools and methodologies that can be adopted for use in the evaluation of other, competing vaccines.

"Scientists in industry, academia and government have unique and necessary contributions to make to the important work of developing a vaccine against HIV," says NIAID Director Anthony S. Fauci, MD "Public-private partnerships such as this bring our collective strengths to bear on one of the world's most serious health problems."

With an estimated 5 million new HIV infections worldwide this year - about 14,000 each day - developing a vaccine against HIV is a top biomedical research priority. Because 95% of those infections occur in people living in developing countries, vaccine development must include strategies for testing vaccine candidates in those regions.

NIAID established the HVTN in 2000 to combine its domestic and international HIV vaccine clinical trials programs and build the necessary infrastructure to quickly evaluate promising products, such as the Merck vaccine. Today, the network ...