
Promising AIDS Vaccine Stopped
TRENTON, NJ -- Merck & Co said Friday that it
has stopped the development of a promising experimental AIDS vaccine
after it failed a large international test and that the company has
ended enrollment and vaccination of volunteers in the study, which was
partly funded by the National Institutes of Health.
Officials at the company said 24 of 741 volunteers who got the vaccine
later became infected with HIV, compared to 21 of 762 participants in a
comparison group who only received a dummy shots.
"It's very disappointing news," said Keith Gottesdiener, head of Merck's
clinical infectious disease and vaccine research group. "A major effort
to develop a vaccine for HIV really did not deliver on the promise."
Michael Zwick, an HIV researcher at Scripps Research Institute, said
it's too soon to know if other vaccines using the same strategy would
also fail,
AP reports.
"It's par for the course in the HIV field," he said of the Merck result.
The volunteers in the experiment were mostly from high risk groups for
contracting the virus, mainly homosexual men and female sex workers, but
none of the participants had HIV at the beginning of the test. According
to Merck & Co, they were all repeatedly counseled on how to reduce their
risk of HIV infections, including use of condoms.
The National Institutes of Health said in a statement that the vaccine
neither prevented HIV infection, nor did it limit severity of the
disease in those who become infected with HIV as a result of their own
behaviors that exposed them to the virus. |