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Four of five monkeys treated with the gel, which contains a generic compound approved for use in people, were protected from an animal version of the virus, said researchers who led the study appearing tomorrow in the journal Nature.

After years of failure, researchers are now finding drugs that help protect men and women during sex from the AIDS virus, called HIV for human immunodeficiency virus. The compound in the new study might be combined with other preventive drugs into a successful gel, said Ashley Haase, a University of Minnesota microbiologist who helped lead the research team in Minneapolis.

“Such an approach might be very effective, more than the individual components might prove to be,” Haase said yesterday in a telephone call with reporters. “The pandemic continues to grow unless we find a way to stop transmission.”

About 32 million people worldwide have HIV and 2.7 million are newly infected each year, most through sex or other contact with contaminated body fluids. While condoms can block the virus, many African women who want to get pregnant won’t use them and risk infection from their husbands, researchers have said.

Drug Added to Gel

In the Nature study released today, Haase and Patrick Schlievert, also of the University of Minnesota, tested monkeys with a drug called glycerol monolaurate, or GML, added to Johnson & Johnson’s K-Y Warming Liquid, a sex gel.

The study suggested the GML microbicide stops certain immune-system cells, which are part of the body’s defense system and usually targeted by the AIDS virus, from moving to infected regions of the vagina.

“In essence, it’s a dead-end infection,” said Charlene Dezzutti, laboratory network director of the U.S.-funded Microbicides Trials Network at the University of Pittsburgh. “It’s a new approach to thinking about microbicides.”

Five monkeys that got the gel without GML were all infected with simian AIDS, called SIV. Originally, the researchers thought GML protected all five monkeys that got it. Later, one was found to have the virus.

Damping Effect

While GML has antibacterial properties, it damps immune cells, Haase said. More experiments in animals will be needed before GML can be tried in humans, he said.

Sex gels on humans had been ineffective until last month, when researchers reported Indevus Pharmaceuticals Inc.’s PRO2000 cut women’s risk of catching HIV by about a third. Endo Pharmaceuticals Holdings Inc. agreed in January to buy Indevus for about $637 million.

A separate study reported the same day at a meeting in Montreal showed a gel containing Gilead Sciences Inc.’s Viread, an AIDS drug, could prevent the spread of a monkey version of HIV.

“I think we’ll definitely have” an effective microbicide before an AIDS vaccine, Pittsburgh’s Dezzutti said in a telephone interview. “It’s just a matter of getting all the right pieces together.”

To contact the reporter on this story: John Lauerman in Boston at jlauerman@bloomberg.net.