The despair that set in after the failure of the latest effort to develop an AIDS vaccine has given way to renewed determination on the part of the scientific community, says the Canadian scientist leading an international effort to maximize global activity in the field.
As the world gets ready to mark the 25th anniversary of the discovery of the virus that causes AIDS, there is a consensus that work must continue, both to puzzle out how the human immune system responds to infection with HIV and more generally how the immune system works, Alan Bernstein said in an interview yesterday.
Dr. Bernstein, who is executive director of the Global HIV Vaccine Enterprise, said he remains hopeful success can be built upon the lessons learned from the failure of the STEP trial and other efforts to date.
"Our genome ... is three billion bases [base pairs] of DNA. This virus is about 10 million bases of DNA. We're a lot smarter than this virus," he said.
Ocadia Ramirez was one of 175 Dominican prostitues included in the STEP trial, the testing of an experimental vaccine against AIDS. (Ramon Espinosa/The Canadian Press)
"So I am an optimist. I think you have to be as a scientist."
He added: "I could not guarantee that one day we'll have a vaccine. But not to try is to say to all the 33 million people who are infected with the virus and the 2.3 million who are becoming infected with the virus every year: 'We're giving up.' "
May 20 is the 25th anniversary of the publication in the journal Science of a report from Luc Montagnier and colleagues of La Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital and the Pasteur Institute in Paris that they had discovered what they believed to be the cause of the frightening and mysterious disease now called AIDS.
To mark the occasion, the journal is publishing an editorial by Dr. Bernstein in this week's issue, along with review papers discussing the challenges facing the vaccine effort and a discussion of HIV prevention.
Much hope had been focused on the STEP trial, which tested a vaccine developed by pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. Inc.
But last September the study was abruptly halted after it became apparent the vaccine was not preventing infection.
It was later seen that participants who received the vaccine actually went on to develop HIV at higher rates than those given a placebo.
In the aftermath of that disappointment, a number of people have questioned whether a vaccine against HIV will ever be developed.
In the intervening months, a number of scientific symposia have been held to try to figure out what went wrong with the vaccine and to chart a safe course forward for the vaccine effort.
"I think the majority view, and certainly my own view, is that we need more, not less, investigations in humans of what happens when a human being is infected with this virus. And that's the only way we're going to develop a vaccine," said Dr. Bernstein, who until last fall served as president of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
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