Wall Street Journal Blog - November 13, 2008
Posted by Jacob Goldstein

The Health Blog hopped a water taxi yesterday to the old Army Terminal in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. It was a business trip: Some luminaries in HIV-vaccine research were gathered there to open a new lab.

The center, a research hub for the International Aids Vaccine Initiative, is something of a big deal for New York City, which has lots of fancy researchers and academic hospitals but has long been a biotech also-ran.

As the New York Times recently noted, the city hopes a little biotech hub will spring up in the Army Terminal, a giant hulk of a building commissioned in 1918 and designed by the famous architect Cass Gilbert. Over three million troops (including Elvis Presley) passed through the building during WWII.

The mayor was on hand yesterday to wave the flag, but we were more interested in what the scientists had to say. One notable, Dennis Burton of the Scripps Research Institute talked about the effort to get the body to make antibodies that neutralize HIV - a project that's particularly difficult given the virus's ability to hide its key structural elements from the immune system. And David Watkins of the University of Wisconsin presented some promising results in getting monkeys' immune systems to generate T cells to attack an HIV-like virus.

But from the point of view of finding a vaccine that actually protects people from HIV, this is all rather preliminary stuff. Especially after last year's failure of a big Merck vaccine trial, which suggested the vaccine might even have put patients at greater risk, regulatory agencies are going to be very, very cautious about letting any vaccine even get into clinical trials. Meanwhile, the epidemic rages on.

Summing up the big picture, IAVI CEO Seth Berkeley chose a maritime metaphor appropriate to the setting: "It's like putting a ship together and sailing it in the middle of a hurricane."

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