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.

AlphaVax has conscientiously worked on the development of a vaccine for HIV; which admittedly is a very difficult target for vaccine approaches. This effort was originally supported by the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) and has been subsequently funded through the NIH. In designing this vaccine we selected genes from clinical clade C isolates from South Africa in order to maximize the probability of its success in populations with the highest epidemic prevalence of HIV. Dose-escalation trials that evaluated the safety of a single-gene prototype product were conducted in the US and South Africa in 2003. The results from these trials were very encouraging and showed the vaccine to be safe and immunogenic. Currently, a multi-gene HIV alphavaccine product has been down-selected and is being manufactured by AlphaVax in 2009. This product will be available to the HIV Vaccine Trials Network for phase I clinical evaluation at the government's discretion.