HIV Vaccine

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is the world's leading infectious disease killer. To date, more than 20 million people have died and approximately 40 million more are living with the disease, exemplifying the critical need for intervention.

Our lead project is an HIV clade C vaccine program, originally supported by the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) and now being pursued in collaboration with NIH and the South African Medical Research Council. Other institutions, like Johns Hopkins, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Cape Town, and Duke University, provide further support. This program is being supported by over $35 million in non-equity funding, not including the cost of its Phase I clinical trial activity, which is being borne by the HIV Vaccine Trials Network.

The urgent need for an HIV vaccine drove this project into clinical trials in mid-2003. To maximize the probability of a successful HIV vaccine for populations with the highest epidemic prevalence, we selected genes from clinical isolates in South Africa. Dose-escalation trials that evaluated the safety of a single-gene prototype product have been completed in the US and South Africa. The results from these trials were encouraging and showed the vaccine to be safe and immunogenic. Currently, candidate, multi-gene HIV vaccine constructs are being evaluated for immunogenicity in non-human primates. The results from these studies will guide our selection of which vaccine components to take forward for manufacture and clinical evaluation by the HIV Vaccine Trials Network.