Gloom in scientific community as two promising AIDS vaccine trials are halted. The drugs might have put volunteers at increased risk, it is feared.
The results of the trials conducted across four continents, have spurred unprecedented soul-searching as researchers try to make sense of what happened and assess whether they should have seen it coming.
"This is on the same level of catastrophe as the Challenger disaster" that destroyed a NASA space shuttle, said Robert Gallo, co-discoverer of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which causes AIDS, and head of the Institute for Human Virology in Baltimore.
Both field tests were halted last September, and seven other trials of similarly designed AIDS vaccines have been either stopped or put off indefinitely. Some may be modified and others canceled outright. Numerous experts are questioning both the scientific premises and the overall strategy of the nearly $500 million in AIDS vaccine research financed annually by the U.S. government, Washington Post reports.
The recently closed studies, STEP and Phambili, used a vaccine made from a common respiratory virus called adenovirus type 5 that had been crippled and then loaded with fragments of HIV. Both studies were halted when it became clear the STEP study was futile and possibly harmful.
The results of the Phambili vaccine trial, which was conducted in South Africa, were revealed last month and only worsened the gloom. Although the number of new HIV infections in that study was far smaller than in STEP and too few from which to draw firm conclusions those results, too, hinted at a trend toward harm among vaccine recipients.