Results of the first large-scale clinical trials of a vaccine for HIV/AIDS will be announced within weeks, the head of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative said yesterday.
Dr Seth Berkeley, in Dublin for a brief meeting at the Department of Foreign Affairs, said while he did not expect the results to show the vaccine to be very effective, he was confident a vaccine against HIV/AIDS would be available within the next 10 years.
"It's very hard to predict the timeline but I certainly think within a decade, if we continue to drive it forward, we will have an effective vaccine," he said.
Some 70 million people have already been infected or died of HIV/AIDS worldwide, with at least 90 per cent of infections occurring in developing countries.
The International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) is an international non-governmental organisation which was established in 1996 to try to accelerate the development of a HIV/AIDS vaccine.
It is also lobbying governments to offer incentives to private companies to develop such a vaccine. Incentives were required, Dr Berkeley said, because the vaccine would be used mostly in poorer countries where people could not afford it.
He stressed political will was very important if progress was to be made. "Political will has improved but it's not there yet," he said.
"Scientifically, HIV is a challenging virus and the development of a vaccine has been scientifically challenging. On the other hand there also has not been the right political structure in place to move this forward at the speed it should be moved forward. And if you stand back and say that this epidemic has now infected or killed more than 70 million people and is basically spinning out of control around the world, the amount of effort that's been put into finding a vaccine, which is the only way that we will ultimately end the epidemic, has been pitifully small."
Work on the development of the VaxGen vaccine, the one which has just been tested on about 5,000 people in the US, Canada and the Netherlands, began 15 years ago. "We are now 22 years into the epidemic and it's the first vaccine that's been tested to see if it works. Most people do not expect that vaccine to be very successful but we will wait and see," he said. The company behind the vaccine is a small US biotechnology company.
Apart from this, a number of other vaccines are at earlier stages of development, he confirmed.
The Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Mr Tom Kitt, who met Dr Berkeley, said the Government had contributed over €4 million to IAVI to date.