BANGKOK, July 12 (AFP) - The agonising quest for an HIV vaccine needs a near-doubling of funds, to 1.2 billion dollars a year, if it is ever to meet its goal, the International AIDS Conference was told on Monday.
"Only a vaccine can end the epidemic," said Seth Berkley, president of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), which is spearheading the hunt for vaccine protection against the human immunodeficiency virus.
"The world is inching toward a vaccine, when we should be making strides. The single biggest obstacle is that vaccine development is not a top scientific, political and economic priority."
Berkley noted that in the 23-year history of AIDS, "we've only had one vaccine that has been fully tested on humans. This is a global disgrace."
Annual spending on vaccine research is running at around 650 million dollars, "less than one percent of total spending on all health product development" in the fight against AIDS, Berkley said.
That level had to be nearly doubled, to 1.2 billion dollars a year, to help get more prototypes into test and resolve tenacious puzzles as to exactly why HIV is such a stealthy foe, he said.
More than 20 million people have died of AIDS and some 38 million more have HIV. Some 4.8 million new infections occurred in 2003, the highest in a single year.
In funding terms, vaccines have always been the poor cousin of research into treatments, which are far more profitable for pharmaceutical giants.
And in scientific terms, no-one yet knows what is the genetic recipe of antibodies or immune cells that can be primed for destroying the virus. In a planetary population of six billion, not a single person has ever been found whose immune system eradicated an infection by HIV.
"We have a lock but we don't have the key," IAVI Senior Vice President Wayne Koff said.
AIDSVAX, an antibody vaccine based on the gp120 surface protein of the virus, is the only vaccine to have completed all three phases of human trials.
Tested among volunteers in the United States and Thailand, it proved to be safe but a flop.
IAVI, a not-for-profit agency based in New York, issued its first update in two years on the state of play in vaccine research.
It said the vaccine "pipeline" has widened substantially in the past couple of years. More than 30 candidate vaccines are in trials, compared with just a handful two years ago.
The problem, though, is that almost all of them are in the early phases of testing, on small groups of volunteers, which means they have a long way to go -- 2007 at the earliest -- before they complete the full trial process.
Only one of these vaccines is in Phase III trials, the widest and most expensive testing phase. It is a combination of AIDSVAX and a vaccine based on a virus called canarypox, made by the European firm Aventis.
Another prototype set to be launched for Phase III later this year is a vaccine based on the adenovirus, devised by the US firm Merck.
Another problem is that almost all of the new vaccine candidates in the pipeline follow the same hypothetical approach.
Following the disappointment in the search for an antibody vaccine, which is the traditional path taken by vaccine designers, the latest prototypes are focussing on the other regiment in the immune army -- the immune cells.
These cells would be primed to recognise an HIV-infected cell and destroy it, an approach that is more of a cure than a prevention.
If this bet on a single horse turns out to be wrong, years of precious time will have been wasted, Koff said.
On the plus side, IAVI said that a good first step had been made towards the so-called Holy Grail -- finding the right antibodies to neutralise HIV as soon as it entered the bloodstream.
Five interesting-looking specimens have been found among infected people from around the world and are being tested to see how well they combat the virus.
On the political front, Berkley praised the Group of Eight countries in their summit in June for launching the Global HIV Vaccine Enterprise, which aims to beef up collaboration and cooperation in scientific research.
"But this is fifth time the G8 has spoken out on AIDS vaccines," Berkley said. "(...) We have to make sure that it's followed up with resources and leadership."
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