San Francisco Chronicle - Thursday June 8, 1989
David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor

One of the experimental vaccines has already shown that it can stimulate the production of antibodies to the virus when it is injected into humans, according to Dr. Clifford H. Lane, chief vaccine researcher at the government's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

One major problem facing ing the vaccine seekers is that HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus, comes in many strains; scientists fear that a vaccine that provides immunity against one strain may not work against any other.

At the fifth International Conference on AIDS here yesterday, Lane reported that he and his colleagues have created a harmless, genetically engineered virus that invades moth cells and produces a protein known as GP-160. That compound is a duplicate of one of the distinctive proteins carried on the surface of three strains of the AIDS virus.

The vaccine made of GP-160 stimulates T-4 cells, the key elements of the human immune system, to produce antibodies that bind to the AIDS virus.

So far, 115 gay or bisexual men who have tested negative for the AIDS virus have received increasing doses of the test vaccine with no toxic effects, Lane said. Although this has been a test only of the vaccine's safety, he said, it has already shown promise that further developments may indicate that a GP-160 vaccine can stimulate production of the essential antibodies that can neutralize the AIDS virus.

There are major ethical problems ahead as vaccines are eventually produced, and Wendy Mariner, an attorney from the Boston University School of Public Health, underscored a major one.

Unlike new drugs that can be tested on people who are sick, she noted, vaccines will have to be tested on people who are completely healthy, and the risks may be unknown.

When large-scale tests are planned, Mariner said, they will probably be tried in Africa, where half the world's AIDS sufferers now live and die and where the epidemic is spreading most rapidly.

But if a new vaccine is to be tested on otherwise healthy people in Africa, she said, then the drug companies that stand to profit by worldwide marketing will have to pledge themselves to provide it without cost to all the people in all the African nations that agree to the large-scale clinical trials.

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