Still hope for successful AIDS vaccine

Researchers on Thursday expressed the hope that new approaches to developing an HIV/AIDS vaccine could eventually vanquish the global pandemic. Dr Barton Haynes, a vaccine researcher at Duke University in North Carolina, in the US, said with so many different HIV/AIDS vaccine trials taking place globally, the chances of finding one that worked were good. According to the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), there are currently two dozen different vaccines being tested in 27 trials involving human volunteers around the world. Reuters quoted Haynes as saying: "It is safe to say we have reached the beachhead in the quest for an HIV/AIDS vaccine." At the recent 2003 HIV/AIDS Vaccine conference in New York, Haynes said the pace of research had accelerated, despite the first vaccine to complete all three phases of human testing, AIDSVax, by the pharmaceutical company VaxGen, having failed earlier this year to protect humans against HIV.