MILAN, Dec 1 (AFP) - A prototype of an AIDS vaccine will be tested soon in Italy, possibly before Christmas, Health Minister Girolamo Sirchia said Saturday on World AIDS Day.
Sirchia predicted that "good news will arrive" from the work of Italian researcher Barbara Ensoli, who has spent the last seven years testing the vaccine to see if it is reliable and whether it has unpleasant side effects.
Ensoli had already announced that testing would go ahead in 2002 on male volunteers at three hospitals, one in Milan and two in Rome.
Further testing of the vaccine is then expected to take place in Africa.
Ensoli, who is employed by the Higher Italian Institute for Health, bases her optimism for the vaccine on "promising" results from tests on monkeys.
The new prototype is based not on the inoculation of the viral protein TAT against which a person's immune system fights, but on the genetic material or gene which produces the protein in question.
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