Global Vaccine Development: Lessons From The Road To A New HIV Vaccine Trial

Three decades of advances in HIV treatment and prevention have curbed mortality from the HIV epidemic, but every year since 2010 2 million more people around the world have been infected with HIV. This is a sad reminder that we still have not put the brakes on this clever viral menace. Millions of lives and the hopes of an entire generation thus hang on the development of an effective HIV vaccine. Those hopes were rekindled in November 2016 with the opening of a major new HIV vaccine trial in South Africa. Called HVTN 702, the trial will enroll 5,400 adults to receive five injections of an investigational HIV vaccine or a matching placebo. This latest step in a global effort to develop an effective HIV vaccine builds on a legacy of failure, hubris, and reinvention. Each stage of this history has much to teach us about the development of preventive vaccines in general. Failure The legacy of HIV vaccine failure kicked off in earnest in 2003 when disappointed researchers announced the failure of the phase III trial of AIDSVAX, that day’s leading HIV vaccine candidate. In over 5,000 high-risk subjects in the United States and other western countries, the risk of HIV infection was nearly identical among vaccine and placebo recipients. Undaunted, HIV vaccine scientists confronted this news with admirable perseverance, and scientific creativity. They hypothesized that an effective HIV vaccine required not the antibody responses elicited by AIDSVAX (and other existing vaccines) but...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - Category: Health Management Authors: Tags: Global Health Policy clinical research HIV/AIDS Research and Development vaccines Source Type: blogs