TORONTO, Aug 15, 2006 (AFP) - AIDS campaigners led by former US president Bill Clinton appealed to scientists Tuesday to pursue the quest for a vaccine against HIV, a path that has been sown with innumerable disappointments.
In a speech to the International AIDS Conference here, Clinton ruefully recalled how, in 2001, hopes were high that a vaccine against the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) could be up and ready by 2010.
Today, though, only one prototype vaccine has ever completed the vast process of human trials and it proved to be a flop. Researchers are now grimly aware that they are facing a pathogen as complex and elusive, as variable and mutating, as it is deadly.
"When I launched the Millennium Vaccine Initiative in my last year as president, we thought we could get there within a decade. Now we still think we're a decade away," Clinton said.
"The more we learn about the biochemistry, the more frustrating it is," he said. "But it's hard to imagine a world totally without AIDS, without a vaccine, if not a cure. So I thank the people that are not too tired to continue this work and not too frustrated who believe there has to be an answer here and are determined to find it."
The United Nations' special envoy for AIDS in Africa, Stephen Lewis, said: "The quest for a vaccine is the single most important quest in the world."
"If you want to end the pandemic definitively, conclusively, you need (a) vaccine."
Vaccines work by priming antibodies and immune cells to recognise and then destroy a viral intruder.
The glittering prize is a formula that would give total immunity. But even a partially effective one would slow the spread of HIV. According to projections by the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), a vaccine that is only 40-percent effective could save around a million new infections every year by 2020.
IAVI's founder and chief executive, Seth Berkley, said HIV was a redoubtable foe: "This is the single toughest virus we've ever had to deal with."
But he said there were many causes for optimism.
One reason is funding: money devoted to HIV vaccine research last year reached more than 750 million dollars, at least twice the level of 2000.
More prototype vaccines are in the pipeline: 30 of them are currently being tested on people in two dozen countries, and the vaccine design is become wider and more innovative, exploring different ways of attacking the virus.
In addition, vaccine engineers today are working more closely than ever before, pooling their knowledge, rather than persevering separately.
Berkley stressed, though, that a lot more could be done to help their mission, notably by boosting incentives for the pharmaceutical industry to invest in HIV vaccines and by cutting the time it takes to assess candidate vaccines.
It can take as long as 15 years for a "proof-of-concept" process by which a promising vaccine undergoes two phases of human trials to test it for safety and effectiveness. After this, it undergoes a further, wider-scale trial, whose results are then closely scrutinised by regulators before it is licensed.
Berkley said there were many smart ways by which the proof-of-concept process could be slashed to as little as five years.
This could be done by cutting red tape; helping developing countries where these trials are mostly carried out to boost their ability to identity and recruit volunteers and carry out oversight of vaccine trials; and earlier testing of the vaccine among people at high risk from HIV infection.
Berkley was confident that this could be achieved without weakening safety safeguards. "We can never compromise on safety," he said.
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