IN A sudden shift of policy, the US government has scrapped plans for one controversial AIDS vaccine trial and announced it will combine the work of two federal institutions.
Until the announcement, both the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense had proposed trials to test similar vaccines鈥攁 dose of canarypox virus engineered to carry HIV-1 proteins with a booster shot of the HIV protein gp120.
But in a recent commentary in Nature, AIDS researcher John Moore of Cornell University鈥檚 Weill Medical College in New York criticised the apparent duplication as a waste of money and effort (快猫短视频, 26 January, p 16). Other researchers defended the trials, saying both were valuable because they were to be tested on different populations and had different scientific objectives.
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Last week, the NIH cancelled its trial. According to Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH鈥檚 National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the decision was not driven by the criticism but by the latest findings. The NIH trial, he explains, was designed to compare the types of immune responses the vaccine evoked with the protection it provided. That required the vaccine to produce an immune response in at least 30 per cent of volunteers. But a new analysis of a previous trial suggests the response wasn鈥檛 that strong. 鈥淚t didn鈥檛 even come very close,鈥� says Fauci. The defence department trial, which was designed to test only the efficacy of the vaccine, will still go forward.
There鈥檚 no chance of doubling up in the future. The NIH also announced that starting later this year, the defence department鈥檚 entire AIDS vaccine programme will be merged into the NIH. Fauci cited new budget directives and a shift in the historical role of the two agencies as the rationale for the change. But the move should deflect another criticism by Moore and others: that the two agencies have often acted more like rivals than colleagues.
The cancelled NIH trial, which involved 11,000 volunteers, had an anticipated price tag of $60 to $80 million dollars.