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From: dgreen (Dan R. Greening)
Newsgroups: sci.med.aids
Subject: Re: AIDS Vaccines.
Message-ID: <31573@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU>
Date: 6 Feb 90 04:32:26 GMT
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Approved: aids@cs.ucla.edu
Archive-number: 1671

Al Wilson <BIO2AEW%HOFSTRA.BITNET@oac.ucla.edu> writes:

|          The largest problem with a AIDS vaccine is "how
|  to test" it.  Conventionally it is done with animals,
|  then humans.  But there are no animals that are
|  sickened by AIDS (while a few can be infected), so
|  testing animals is out.  And in reality, how can you
|  test the effects on humans? If you give the vaccine to
|  someone, the only way to test it is to inject the
|  person with the virus and see if it replicates.  I don't
|  think there are many people willing to take the chance.

There are some synthetic mice which have been engineered to contract AIDS,
I believe.

In the "Duesberg" sense, no we can't test an AIDS vaccine without injecting
a person with HIV.  However, one can take blood from vaccinated 
individuals, inject it with HIV, and see what happens.  In fact, that is
how current HIV vaccines are being tested.  A number of readers from this
newsgroup are participants in such a study, with a genetically engineered
HIV protein gp160.  Results from that study appear quite promising.

For example, at one point during the study some fellow participants and I
developed cytotoxic killer T cells to HIV infected cells.  How was this
tested?  Lab workers took CD4-expressing cells from us, engineered 
those cells to express gp160, and grew them.  Then they took our blood
components, post-vaccination, and threw the engineered cells in there.
For some of us, the CD4+gp160 expressing cells were killed.

When laboratory results indicate that a vaccine might work well, 
a large population will be vaccinated and tracked.  Aggregate conformance to
safe-sex, safe-shoot behavior will make it harder to figure out whether
the vaccination worked.  

However, based on the poor track record, safe-sex wise, of a number of 
gay acquantances, I am pretty sure that if a trial vaccine doesn't work, 
a few years of monitoring will discover a number of infections.  I'd
also guess there are plenty of IV drug-users with the same lack of 
control.  (Grim thought, huh?)

Nobody's planning on injecting HIV into any volunteers, that I know of,
to test a vaccine.  People neglect their own health for immediate
gratification--it's almost a human axiom.  As a statistical result, there
is no need to inject HIV into anyone.  People will inadvertantly do it 
themselves, despite being warned.

One final cynical thought:  People seem to hold out vaccines as some
panacea to the AIDS crisis.  Unfortunately, vaccine development is still a
long way off, despite the flashy news headlines that appear all the
time.  In part, it's because people sit on their butts and wait, counting
on others to advance a vaccine or a better treatment, and assume they can't 
contribute anything themselves.

One major problem that NIH has, and that other vaccine developers have, is
that few people volunteer for vaccine trials.

It really bothers me that the NIH gp160 vaccine trial has taken over a year
and a half to run.  The major bottleneck has been a lack of
volunteers, despite the fact that NIH is willing to fly volunteers to and
from Washington, DC from as far as Hawaii.  There are only 110 people in
the study.  10 additional volunteers per month would have pushed the trial
forward by several months.  

They still need people, both for the vaccine program (uninfected individuals)
and for HIV treatment programs (infected individuals).  
The phone number is 1-800-ATRIALS.

-- 

Dan Greening       | NY 914-789-7861 | 12 Foster Court
dgreen@cs.ucla.edu | CA 213-825-2266 | Croton-on-Hudson, NY 10520