Word: hiv
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...vaccine was administered in two stages. First the ALVAC vaccine, which uses a Frankenstein virus of canarypox and HIV, was used as a primer dose, then AIDSVAX was administered as a "booster" to improve the body's immune response to the first shot. Half of the trial's participants received the combination vaccine, while the other half received a placebo. In the final analysis, 74 of the 8,198 placebo recipients became infected with HIV, compared with 51 of 8,197 participants who received the vaccine regimen...
...efficacy is a modest one. But it's the first time we've seen a positive signal of efficacy in a human trial of any HIV vaccine. That's an exciting result in a field that has been characterized by disappointments for two decades," says Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which provided major funding and other support for the Thai trial...
...scientists working on the trial, led in Thailand by the U.S. Army and the Thailand Ministry of Public Health, said they were baffled as to why the two seemingly ineffective vaccines appeared to work together. Another mystery was that the people who became infected with HIV developed roughly the same amount of virus in their blood whether they got the vaccine or the placebo. Typically a protective vaccine would lower a patient's so-called viral load, a criterion that physicians use as the main indicator of HIV infection. The outcome of the trial of RV144 suggests that scientists...
...know whether our current measures of the human immune response are even relevant to the protection that we see in this trial. [That is] a humbling reminder of how little we know, and how much work remains to be done in our search for an optimal HIV vaccine," Fauci says...
...Jonathan Weber, a professor of communicable diseases and an HIV expert at Imperial College in London, says the consistency of the viral load across the placebo and vaccine groups was not a surprise. "It's a fair assumption that this vaccine works through antibody production," he says. "We've known for years that antibodies don't seem to affect the course of an HIV infection. Antibodies can be preventive, but they can't modify the disease...