AIDS-hit South Africa to hold mass-scale HIV vaccine trial
Feb 08 2:37 PM US/Eastern

The first mass trial of an HIV vaccine which has yielded promising results in smaller tests in
the United States and elsewhere is to be launched in AIDS-hit South Africa, it was announced.

The South African AIDS Vaccine Initiative said the programme, baptised Phambili or "Going
Forward" in the Xhosa language, will be conducted jointly with the HIV Vaccine Trials Network
of the US National Institutes of Health.

"Three thousand participants will be recruited from four South African provinces -- Gauteng,
North West, Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal," it said in a statement.

The trial sites include the township of Soweto outside Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban.

The "test of concept" vaccine, developed by US firm Merck, has been tried on more than 1,800
people across the United States, Canada, Latin America, the Caribbean and Australia.

The vaccine contains three HIV genes but not live HIV and therefore cannot infect volunteers.

Lawrence Corey, lead researcher for the HVTN conducting the study said: "This trial will answer
several major scientific issues that face all of us in the field of HIV-vaccine development.

"It will determine the usefulness of vaccines that induce high immune response to the parts of
the virus that are similar between different strains of HIV."

South Africa has one of the world's highest rates of HIV infections, with more than 5.5 million
infected people out of the national population of 47 million.

In the more-than 25-year history of AIDS, only one prototype vaccine, AIDSVAX, has completed
the vast process of human trials and it proved to be a disappointing failure.