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 25 Years After Discovery Of HIV
Search For Vaccine Goes On
by The Canadian Press
Posted: May 9, 2008 - 5:00 pm ET
(Toronto, Ontario) 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.''
©365Gay.com 2008
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