- UNITED NATIONS (AFP)
- An anti-AIDS vaccine could be commercialized in as little as five years
but numerous health, economic and industrial pitfalls stand in the way
of its manufacture and large-scale distribution, according to researchers
and experts attending the UN conference on AIDS here.
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- Last year, just 350 million dollars in public and private
funds were earmarked for research on a vaccine against the Acquired Immunodeficiency
Syndrome, compared with the more than three billion dollars the United
States and Europe spend on drugs to treat AIDS patients.
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- Yet with 15,000 people infected daily with the Human
Immunodeficiency Virus which causes AIDS, a vaccine remains the world's
best hope to stop the pandemic that has killed 22 million people in 20
years.
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- Seth Berkley, president of the International AIDS Vaccine
Initiative (IAVI), says already, too much time has been wasted.
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- "Twenty years after the start of the epidemic, no
candidate vaccine has been fully tested. This is a global disgrace,"
he said here at the United Nations General Assembly special session on
HIV/AIDS, the first time in the international body's 56-year history that
a special session has been convened for a health issue.
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- HIV's mutability and non-linear development continue
to stymie scientists, among the reasons for the slow progress on a vaccine,
said Aventis Pasteur's AIDS vaccine director Michel Klein.
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- Even if doctors have better understanding of the virus'
transmission and mutation mechanisms, they still do not know "the
precise correlations between immuno-response and protection," he said.
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- "There is also no animal model that allows us to
predict just how the vaccine will work with humans," he stressed.
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- Clinical trials in humans to develop a vaccine are costly
-- between 180 and 300 million dollars -- complicated and time-consuming,
said the IAVI.
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- "It takes on average 11 years in development time
for each compound," said Rolf Krebs, chief executive of Germany's
Boehringer Ingelheim, one of six pharmaceutical companies involved in the
quest for an AIDS vaccine.
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- Once developed, "the vaccines could be on the market
in between five and 10 years."
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- Pharmaceutical companies have overcome to some extent
many of the obstacles, with a half-dozen drugs undergoing clinical trials.
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- Vaxgen, a subsidiary of the biotechnology firm Genentech,
has had the greatest success so far with its "AIDSvax" drug,
in Phase III clinical trials in Thailand, North America and the Netherlands
to determine its effectiveness in protecting against HIV infection and
disease. A final analysis of results is expected by next year.
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- Aventis Pasteur is conducting tests in Thailand and results
there are expected by the end of this year. "First indications are
encouraging," said Klein.
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- Even if a vaccine is successfully developed, without
a major international effort, developing nations are unlikely to have access
to it for years, said Berkley in proposing a global fund to ensure the
vaccine can be purchased by poor countries.
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- "In the past, it took 15 to 20 years for vaccines
developed in the North to trickle down to the developing world," he
said.
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- "It is unacceptable for any kind of vaccines, but
even less for HIV, given the seriousness of the epidemic."
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