In HIV vaccine efforts, new strategies and patience are needed in equal measure.

Abstract

ANNECY, FRANCE—If ever there was a scientific endeavor calling for patience and impatience in equal measure, the quest for an effective HIV vaccine would be it. On one hand, with 40 million people infected worldwide with HIV and the number growing by some 15000 newly infected individuals each day, the need for a vaccine has never been more urgent. On the other hand, there are a number of hurdles that have made HIV vaccine research a painfully slow process that demands patience as well as perseverance. For example, HIV’s mutability in an infected individual and the global diversity of HIV strains and subtypes (clades), HIV’s lifelong persistence in the body, and the need to induce both mucosal and systemic immunity to provide protect against different routes of infection are among the many problems vexing vaccine researchers. Faced by such challenges, it’s not surprising that experts generally predict that the first generation of experimental vaccines will at best offer only partial protection for only a fraction of recipients. Nonetheless, scientists have been exploring an array of novel strategies they hope will ultimately result in an effective vaccine, according to new findings reported here at the 13th Cent Gardes Symposium on HIV and AIDS Vaccines. The conference was organized by the Merieux Foundation in partnership with Aventis Pasteur and with the participation of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative. NEUTRALIZING ANTIBODIES REDUX In the early days of HIV vaccine research, attempts to induce humoral immunity—the production of neutralizing antibodies that would block infection by preventing HIV from entering target cells—were met with disappointing results. Early vaccine candidates seemed to offer little hope of