YAOUNDE, Nov 15 (AFP) - Two pioneers in AIDS research who had fallen out bitterly over the discovery of the virus which causes the disease announced here Friday that they had joined forces to devise a trial vaccine.
The scheme, announced at a meeting in the capital of the West African state of Cameroon, brings together Luc Montagnier of France and Robert Gallo of the United States, who were jointly credited with identifying the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).
Gallo said the two had devised a candidate vaccine against HIV, clinical trials for which could start in the next 18 months.
"If it works, I swear I'll do everything I can to make it a top priority for Africa," he said.
In the nearly two decades since HIV was identified as the cause of a fatal disease of the immune system, the quest for a vaccine has been a notoriously neglected area.
Numerous trial vaccines have been put to clinical trial, the term for trying them out on human volunteers to see whether they are safe and effective.
But none has so far cleared the three-phase procedure and is on public release.
Only one -- AIDSVAX -- has so far made it to the Phase III stage, for testing on a large batch of volunteers, and its results are expected in the first quarter of next year.
Another vaccine hopeful, a combination of AIDSVAX and ALVAC-HIV, made by Aventis Pasteur of France, is being launched in Thailand later this year among 16,000 volunteers.
Montagnier told the meeting that he and Gallo were also working on a vaccine to help reduce risk of HIV transmission from infected mothers to their babies via breast milk.
The vaccine could be added to the tuberculosis jab, he hoped.
Montagnier and Gallo fell out after Gallo claimed, in 1983, to have been the the first to identify HIV.
A prolonged US-French legal dispute ensued, touching on patent rights for HIV tests, which ended with a compromise, engineered by polio vaccine pioneer Jonas Salk, that in effect determined the two men to be co-discoverers.
In February this year, in announcing his team-up with Montagnier, Gallo conceded that it had been Montagnier's lab in Paris that had made the breakthrough of isolating the virus.
Friday's announcement was made at a two-day meeting hosted by wives of African leaders.
The meeting aims at drawing world attention to the widening peril of AIDS in Africa.
According to a July 2002 estimate by the UN organisation UNAIDS, of the 40 million people in the world living with HIV/AIDS, 28.5 million live in sub-Saharan Africa.
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