http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/topstories.aspx?ID=BD4A864389

CAPE TOWN -- Funding for the quest to find an AIDS vaccine should continue even as the global economy slows and spending is constrained by the international financial crisis, the head of the nonprofit International AIDS Vaccine Initiative said yesterday.

“My argument would be if you are going to cut, don’t cut the little teeny bit that can give you the tools to end the epidemic,” said the organisation’s president and CEO, Seth Berkley.

About $960m of the $10bn spent globally on the pandemic last year went to AIDS vaccine research.

AIDS has killed 25-million people since it was first identified in the early 1980s, and another 33-million are infected with HIV. With no cure in sight, experts agree that more must be done to prevent new infections.

Condoms, and to a lesser extent male circumcision, offer protection against sexual transmission of HIV, but there are no methods that are controlled by women.

“Women can’t force their partners to wear a condom, they can’t force them to get circumcised, and they can’t necessarily control their sexual encounters,” Berkley said in an interview on the sidelines of an international AIDS vaccine conference in Cape Town.

Despite a significant increase in the number of HIV patients getting treatment in the past few years, thanks largely to a sharp decline in drug prices, the rate of new infections continues to outstrip the rate at which people can obtain medication. For every person who started treatment, another 2,5 become infected, raising tough questions about the sustainability of long-term treatment, said Berkley.

“Unaids priced universal access (to treatment) at $54bn by 2015 for low- and mid-income countries per annum — $90bn if developed countries are included. Can we afford it?” he asked.

This week’s conference, organised by the Global AIDS Vaccine Enterprise and local scientists, has drawn more than 900 of the world’s top experts to assess the state of AIDS vaccine work and debate the best strategies for research. Finding an effective AIDS vaccine is proving exceptionally difficult, partly because HIV itself is still not well understood.

The failure last year of two large vaccine trials that sought to prompt the body’s T-cells to fight off HIV and slow the disease’s progress has seen scientists shift their focus. They are now turning to basic research to find ways of helping the body produce antibodies that will kill HIV before infection takes hold.

Both the US STEP trial and SA’s Phambili trial were testing a vaccine developed by pharmaceutical firm Merck. They were stopped after interim analysis of the STEP trial found volunteers who got the candidate vaccine were at higher risk of contracting HIV than those who got a placebo.