Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1990. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Human tests okd for AIDS vaccine that mimics virus
Miami Herald - Wednesday, November 21, 1990
David Hess, Herald Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON - An experimental AIDS vaccine that closely imitates the HIV-1 virus that causes the fatal disease has been approved by the government for testing in humans. Scientists from Immuno-U.S. Inc. of Rochester, Mich., and from a government-sponsored AIDS steering committee said Tuesday that the Food and Drug Administration approved the experiments after the vaccine immunized a chimpanzee at Immuno's headquarters in Vienna, Austria. While the scientists made clear the vaccine is far from fully tested and does not yet mark a breakthrough in the massive effort to find an AIDS blocker, they were enthusiastic about its prospects. Dr. Robert Belshe, professor of medicine at St. Louis University School of Medicine, called it "an exciting new vaccine" because of its potential ability to fool the body's immune system into erecting a tight defense against the real AIDS virus. Testing will be conducted at five AIDS research centers in three phases. The initial phase, Belshe said, will take two to three years. In that phase, the tests will be limited to determining the safety and immunological properties of the vaccine. If it passes those trials, it will then be tested for effectiveness in the final two phases. Belshe said it will take from five to 10 years to complete the trials and determine whether the vaccine is reasonably effective in humans. Twelve volunteers at each of the research centers will be vaccinated. None is in any danger of being infected by AIDS as a result of the vaccinations, said Laurie Doepel, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Public Health Service. Unlike vaccines for many other infectious diseases, the Immuno vaccine is not composed of dead or diluted HIV viruses. A product of recombinant cell technology, the vaccine consists of the protein gp160 -- which contains the same surface protein and assumes the same physical shape as the AIDS virus. "It mimics AIDS," said Dr. Martha Eibl, director of Immuno's AIDS project in Vienna, and thus should serve in the tests as a reliable indicator of the vaccine's immunological capabilities. Other experimental vaccines have been approved for testing by the FDA, and four other clinical trials are under way using human subjects. This is the first vaccine, however, that so closely disguises itself as the infectious AIDS virus. Eibl said the chimpanzee that withstood the HIV infections got one initial shot and two boosters of the new vaccine. It was then injected with 100 infectious doses of the HIV-1 virus over nearly a three-year period -- with no ill effect. Another vaccinated chimp with a genetically weaker immune system withstood the HIV-1 infections for nine months before contracting the disease. The five centers approved for the vaccine tests are the St. Louis University School of Medicine, the Johns Hopkins Center for Immunization Research Center in Baltimore, University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle, University of Rochester Medical Center in Rochester, N.Y., and the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn.
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