NIH: Comments on Thai (RV144) Phase III HIV vaccine study

The NIH said that, “In an encouraging development, an investigational vaccine regimen has been shown to be well-tolerated and to have a modest effect in preventing HIV infection in a clinical trial involving more than 16,000 adult participants in Thailand.” Following a final analysis of the trial data, the Surgeon General of the U.S. Army, the trial sponsor, announced that the prime-boost investigational vaccine regimen “was safe and 31 percent effective in preventing HIV infection.” Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) which funded the research, said, “These new findings represent an important step forward in HIV vaccine research. For the first time, an investigational HIV vaccine has demonstrated some ability to prevent HIV infection among vaccinated individuals. Additional research is needed to better understand how this vaccine regimen reduced the risk of HIV infection, but certainly this is an encouraging advance for the HIV vaccine field.”

The Thai Phase III HIV vaccine study, also known as RV144, opened in October 2003. The placebo-controlled trial tested the safety and effectiveness of a prime-boost regimen of two vaccines: ALVAC-HIV vaccine (the primer dose), a modified canarypox vaccine developed by Sanofi Pasteur, based in Lyon, France, and AIDSVAX B/E vaccine (the booster dose), a glycoprotein 120 vaccine developed by Vaxgen Inc., and now licensed to Global Solutions for Infectious Diseases (GSID), based in South San Francisco, Calif. The vaccines are based on the subtype B and E HIV strains that commonly circulate in Thailand. The subtype B HIV strain is the one most commonly found in the United States.

Margaret I. Johnston, Ph.D., director of NIAID’s Vaccine Research Program within the Division of AIDS, said, “The Thai study demonstrates why the HIV vaccine field must take a balanced approach to conducting both the basic research needed to discover and design new HIV vaccines and, when appropriate, testing candidate vaccines in people. Both avenues provide critical information that will continue to help us better understand what is needed to develop a fully protective HIV vaccine.”

NIAID and the collaborating partners are working with other scientific experts to determine next steps, including additional research of the RV144 vaccine regimen and the need to consider the impact of these new findings on other HIV vaccine candidates.

Individuals who acquired HIV infection while participating in the Thai trial have been provided access to HIV care and treatment, including highly active antiretroviral therapy based on the guidelines of the Thai Ministry of Public Health.

http://www.nih.gov/news/health/sep2009/niaid-24a.htm

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.