Aids vaccine trials in crucial stage
(Reuters)
10 February 2006
MUMBAI ? India has put a group of volunteers on a year-long watch after giving them a trial vaccine against the HIV virus, marking a key phase in the search for a drug to prevent Aids, a scientist said yesterday. Home to the second-largest number of people living with the killer virus after South Africa, India started giving the vaccine to 30 healthy volunteers in varying doses from February last year.
"The trials have entered the follow-up stage where they will be observed," R.S. Paranjape, deputy director of the National Aids Research Institute, said. During the trials healthy volunteers are given a controlled dosage of the HIV subtype C virus to create resistance. All volunteers sign on to the trial, accepting the risks of possible HIV infection.
India?s trial vaccine targets this subtype, widely prevalent in India, South Africa and China. A vaccine for the developing world, where anti-retroviral drugs are either unavailable or too expensive for millions of HIV-infected people, would be the ultimate prize in the fight against Aids. But efforts to find one have been hampered by the virus?s ability to mutate, scientists say.
"We will begin collecting data from the volunteers after one year from this month," Paranjape said, adding that similar trials in Belgium and Germany have completed the year-long study and are waiting for the Indian scientists to catch up.
"Once the follow-up stage is over, data from volunteers in these three countries will be collated and decoded to study the result," Paranjape said.
The International Aids Vaccine Initiative, which coordinates the global search for a vaccine, says India is important because of its advanced biomedical research facilities and a strong pharmaceutical industry which has developed cheap and effective Aids drugs that are exported across the world.
India is also working on a second vaccine ? called the Modified Vaccinia Ankara ? that will target HIV subtype C. The world?s second-most populous country has an official HIV/Aids caseload of more than 5 million people and experts say that number could quadruple by 2010 as many people are still reluctant to discuss safe sex openly.
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