Is it time to give up the search for an Aids vaccine?

[w¡n9Nµ7 §£@¥€r 123]

Most scientists involved in Aids research believe that a vaccine against HIV is further away than ever and some have admitted that effective immunisation against the virus may never be possible, according to an unprecedented poll conducted by The Independent.

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Nearly two thirds believed that an HIV vaccine will not be developed within the next 10 years and some of them said that it may take at least 20 more years of research before a vaccine can be used to protect people either from infection or the onset of Aids.

A substantial minority of the scientists admitted that an HIV vaccine may never be developed, and even those who believe that one could appear within the next 10 years added caveats saying that such a vaccine would be unlikely to work as a truly effective prophylactic against infection by the virus.

One of the major conclusions to emerge from the failed clinical trial of the most promising prototype vaccine, manufactured by the drug company Merck, was that an important animal model used for more than a decade, testing HIV vaccines on monkeys before they are used on humans, does not in fact work.

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Anthony Fauci, the director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), near Washington, told The Independent that the animal model – which uses genetically engineered simian and human immunodeficiency viruses in a combination, known as SHIV – failed to predict what will happen when a prototype vaccine is moved from laboratory monkeys to people.

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More than 80 per cent of the scientists who took part in our survey agreed that it was now important to change the direction of HIV vaccine research, given the failure of the Merck clinical trial, which was cancelled when it emerged that the vaccine may have actually increased the chances of people developing Aids.

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At the end of last month, Dr Fauci convened a high-level summit of leading HIV specialists at a hotel in Bethesda, Maryland, to discuss the future direction of research.

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He said that one outcome of the meeting was a refocusing of the vaccine effort away from expensive clinical trials towards more fundamental research to understand the basic biology of the virus and its effects on the human immune system.

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The majority of scientists who responded to The Independent's survey said that a vaccine would be the most effective way of preventing the spread of the virus given the failure of many education programmes.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/...ine-814737.html

[churipu 4]

I hope they won't give up trying...even if it took a million years to find a cure.

[AtlantiCat 0]

There will never be a vaccine for AIDS or a Cure for Cancer. The reasoning is simple. You can administer treatments to a single person potentially dozens of times. You can administer a cure only once. The former makes good financial sense. The latter could mean bankruptcy. If you were the one making the financial decisions on this matter, which would you choose?

[mawilson 2,133]

I hope they won't give up trying...even if it took a million years to find a cure.

They probably don't want to find it -- a lifetime of "cocktails" generates more profit than a one-time "cure".

[churipu 4]

I hope they won't give up trying...even if it took a million years to find a cure.

They probably don't want to find it -- a lifetime of "cocktails" generates more profit than a one-time "cure".

Unfortunately I think that too...

[Amby 490]

Keep it in your pants

[eekee 182]

I am not as cynical as most of you.

As far as I know... viruses mutate, making them difficult to cure, although they have developed the HPV vaccine. Is the cure they're talking about making it so that the HIV virus will never turn into AIDS (l~10% of Europeans have this feature genetically, which is something that I remember reading about as a potentially huge breakthrough if they could figure out why it was the case), or a vaccine against HIV? And I don't think anyone outside a Hitler-type is so evil as to not want to cure AIDS for monetary reasons. Besides, aren't the drugs so expensive that most people get them through special organizations set up to help people who are living with HIV/AIDS?

Edited April 24, 2008 by eekee

[DeadPoolX 9]

There will never be a vaccine for AIDS or a Cure for Cancer. The reasoning is simple. You can administer treatments to a single person potentially dozens of times. You can administer a cure only once. The former makes good financial sense. The latter could mean bankruptcy. If you were the one making the financial decisions on this matter, which would you choose?

I don't know about that. We can effectively "cure" other STDs, like gonorrhea, chlamydia, and syphilis. That doesn't mean that very same person can get it again or that other people won't. There are billions of people in the world. There will never be a shortage of sick people.

By the way, just for clarification, I'm using the word "cure" in reference to wiping out the disease within one's body. That doesn't mean they'll have any protection from it again; it simply means it's gone this time. If one were to "treatment" a disease, it'd be like handling HIV/AIDS or Herpes, in which case the best that can be done is to supress it.

Of course... the major difference between all of those is that the STDs I listed in the first paragraph are all bacterial infections and in the second paragraph, they're viruses. They're not handled the same way at all.

Edited April 24, 2008 by DeadPoolX

[Empress of Groovy 373]

I'm pretty cynical, but I really don't think that there is some water-tight concerted effort in the medical research community to suppress the development and/or distribution of lifesaving treatments for incurable diseases and conditions.

You also don't want to underestimate the desire of individuals, teams, or companies to become heroes for developing or discovering cures for terrible diseases.

Additionally, it's not the in-the-trenches researchers who are determining, for example, how much treatments cost or can bring into a company.