India has put a group of volunteers on a year-long watch after giving them a trial vaccine against HIV, marking a key phase in the search for a vaccine to prevent AIDS. India's trial vaccine targets HIV subtype C, widely prevalent in India, South Africa and China. A vaccine for the developing world, where anti-retroviral drugs are either unavailable or too expensive for millions of HIV-infected people, would be the ultimate prize in the fight against AIDS. But efforts to find one have been hampered by the virus's ability to mutate. Home to the second-largest number of people living with the HIV virus after South Africa, India started giving the vaccine to 30 healthy volunteers in varying doses from February last year. The trials have entered the follow-up stage where the volunteers will be observed. The data collection from volunteers will begin after one year from now. Similar trials in Belgium and Germany have completed a year-long study and are waiting for the Indian scientists to catch up. Once the follow-up stage is over, data from volunteers in these three countries will be collated and decoded to study the result. The International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, which coordinates the global search for a vaccine, says India is important because of its advanced biomedical research facilities and a strong pharmaceutical industry, which has developed cheap and effective AIDS drugs that are exported across the world. India is also working on a second vaccine - called the Modified Vaccinia Ankara - that will target HIV subtype C. Human trials of vaccines against various strains of the HIV virus are also being conducted in the United States, Europe and Africa.
National AIDS Research Institute ,
February 2006