November 2003 Cover
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Despite recent discouraging news, there was reason for optimism at the recent AIDS Vaccine conference in New York.
Dr. Robert Johnston at the University of North Carolina has begun human testing of a vaccine designed to combine the two research approaches to AIDS vaccines: provoking the body's immune system to make
antibodies to fight off AIDS, and training cytoxic T lymphocytes to identify and eliminate infected cells in a person with HIV. "I'm more optimistic than just a couple of years ago," said Dr. Robert Gallo, who co-discovered HIV 20 years ago.
Gallo, head of the Institute for Human Virology at the University of Maryland, will begin human trials of his own experimental vaccine soon.
Currently, 12,000 human volunteers worldwide are participating in trials for about two dozen vaccines, with several more experiments set to begin. Volunteers will not be infected with HIV because researchers do not use
the live virus in human experiments. Instead, the scientists try to provoke immune responses by engineering other viruses with bits of HIV or injecting key bits of HIV's genetic material directly.
Editor's Note: from the Associated Press
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