The New York Times - Wednesday, December 2, 1992
Philip J. Hilts, Special to the New York Times

WASHINGTON - The National Institutes of Health announced today that it was ready to begin tests of AIDS vaccines in people at high risk to get the disease.

"This is a small step forward, giving a vaccine for the first time to people who are at high risk for the disease, the kind of people who will ultimately be getting a vaccine against H.I.V.," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the chief Federal agency working on the vaccines.

The experiment will be on a small scale, with two different vaccines being given to 320 patients at medical centers in five cities.

There is little chance that the experiment will produce a clear answer about whether a vaccine works because too few people are included. But it is a necessary first step to tests in which thousands of uninfected volunteers in several countries will get the vaccines.

Trial Possible in 1995

"We are really asking questions about the safety of vaccines in people who are at high risk," Dr. Fauci said. "If people do become infected will the vaccine accelerate or retard the disease? Will people who are at high risk have a different reaction in their immune systems than the people who are not at risk?" Dr. Fauci added that he did not expect a full-scale trial of vaccines against H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, until 1995 at the earliest.

The people who will participate in the tests will include both homosexual and heterosexual men and women, among them people who may currently be having sex with people who are infected with H.I.V.

To assure that the trial is ethical, all the volunteers will be given extensive education on how to avoid infection with the virus.

Dan Bross, director of the AIDS Action Council, which lobbies the Government on behalf of AIDS organizations around the country, said today: "The good news is they are doing the experiment, and the bad news is that we are more than 11 years into the epidemic. The vaccine work is a little ray of hope where there is not a lot of hope."

Vaccines Use Virus Fragments

Perhaps a dozen vaccines against AIDS are being tested in the laboratory, and the two in this trial are the first to have finished preliminary tests. They are made by Genentech Inc. of California, and Biocine, a joint venture of thw Ciba-Geigy Corp. and Chiron Corp.

Both use fragments of two H.I.V. strains common in the United States. Because they do not include the whole virus, they cannot cause H.I.V., but it is hoped they will set off an strong protective reaction in those getting the vaccine.

The trials will take place at Johns Hopkins University Center for Immunization in Baltimore, the St. Louis University School of Medicine, the University of Rochester Medical Center, Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, and the University of Washington in Seattle.

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