Word: vaxgen
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...vaccine, called RV144, combined two older vaccines that had each proved unsuccessful in previous tests: ALVAC, from Sanofi Pasteur, the vaccine division of French drugmaker Sanofi-Aventis; and AIDSVAX, originally developed by VaxGen Inc. and now held by the nonprofit Global Solutions for Infectious Diseases...
...This was the approach used by VaxGen's AIDSVax, the only AIDS vaccine candidate that has so far made it to Phase III testing, the final stage before clinical approval. That vaccine was designed to spark an immune response to a surface protein called gp120. But results of that trial showed in 2003 that the vaccine was insufficiently effective. To date, dozens of possible AIDS vaccines have been tested, and none seem especially promising...
...little companies that are vying for deals say they are being stymied by an opaque and glacially slow contracting process. The one big contract that has been awarded--for 75 million doses of a next-generation anthrax vaccine--is tangled in controversy; it went to a California firm, VaxGen, which in its 10-year history has never brought a drug to market. In the scientific community, biodefense is viewed as yet another boondoggle that is sucking money and resources from critical public-health needs like new antibiotics and vaccines. Indeed, the consensus outside the Administration is that the program...
...VaxGen's AIDSVAX vaccine, for example, targets gp120, a protein on the surface of HIV that latches onto receptors on human immune cells. The virus can then break in, multiply and kill the cell. AIDSVAX has a synthetic version of gp120 that tricks the body into producing antibodies; when real HIV shows up, they're meant to bind to the protein and prevent attachment. But researchers now realize that gp120 can take many forms, and antibodies to one will not work on another. Researchers think that effective vaccines will need to combine gp120 with other approaches...
...also learned that human AIDS, unlike diseases such as rabies or smallpox, can't be reliably imitated in animals, so vaccines have to be tested in humans by trial and error. In that sense, the AIDSVAX test was a success even as it failed. "For so many years," says VaxGen's president, Dr. Don Francis, "the conventional view was that we couldn't do efficacy trials for AIDS vaccines. You couldn't get volunteers, and people would increase their risk behaviors if they thought they were protected. We've proved that you can do trials with the highest of standards...