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Failure Of Latest HIV Vaccine Test: A 'Huge Disappointment'
The largest current study of an AIDS vaccine, involving 2,500 people, is being stopped.
After an oversight committee took a preliminary peek at the results this past Monday, they concluded there was no way would show that the vaccine prevents HIV infection.
Nor would the vaccine suppress the wily virus among people who get infected despite being vaccinated.
So they on HVTN-505, as the study is called.
"It was a huge disappointment," says study leader , who learned the bad news at 1:45 Monday afternoon.
Hammer tells Shots the blow was all the more crushing because just a month earlier the had met its goal for participants.
"It was a big traumatic event to put all this effort in and then have the vaccine trial stop because of futility a month after we completed enrollment," Hammer says. He's chief of infectious diseases at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and a leading AIDS researcher who's been fighting the virus since the pandemic's beginning.
Participants are being notified that no more shots will be given. They will be followed for up to five more years to glean as much insight as possible from the $77 million, federally financed project.
It's another swerve into the ditch for AIDS researchers' on the long road to devise a vaccine that can prevent HIV infection, or at least blunt it, in a significant proportion of people at risk.
The only success so far has been in a involving 16,000 volunteers in Thailand. Published in late 2009, it showed a reduction in the rate of HIV infection by only 31 percent — not enough to deploy as a public health weapon, but a glimmer that encouraged researchers to think a protective vaccine is possible.
However, the latest big hope was dashed by these numbers: Among those in the just-halted study who got the vaccine, 41 people got infected with HIV, compared to 30 who got placebo shots.
That doesn't necessarily mean that the vaccine actually increased people's risk of HIV infection, because the difference is not statistically significant. But Hammer acknowledges that possibility.
"It's clear evidence the vaccine didn't work and may in some fashion put them at greater risk — we don't know that," he says. "The major message is they were not protected."
It may put the kibosh on the future use of an weakened cold virus, called , that was used as a vector — a vehicle carrying selected HIV genes that was used as part of the complicated four-shot vaccine regimen.
The possible riskiness of using the Ad5 vector was raised by results of an earlier HIV vaccine trial called back in 2007. That study was halted prematurely because of evidence that those who got the vaccine had higher risk of HIV infection.
The designers of the big HVTN-505 study hoped they'd avoided that problem by enrolling only people who had no evidence of prior exposure to the Ad5 cold virus. They reasoned that antibodies directed at the cold virus could have interfered with its efficacy as a vaccine vector and somehow increased the risk of HIV infection.
Other, early-phased HIV vaccine trials are using the Ad5 vector. Those will be reevaluated in light of the new findings, Hammer says.
The largest current study of an AIDS vaccine, involving 2,500 people, is being stopped.
After an oversight committee took a preliminary peek at the results this past Monday, they concluded there was no way would show that the vaccine prevents HIV infection.
Nor would the vaccine suppress the wily virus among people who get infected despite being vaccinated.
So they on HVTN-505, as the study is called.
"It was a huge disappointment," says study leader , who learned the bad news at 1:45 Monday afternoon.
Hammer tells Shots the blow was all the more crushing because just a month earlier the had met its goal for participants.
"It was a big traumatic event to put all this effort in and then have the vaccine trial stop because of futility a month after we completed enrollment," Hammer says. He's chief of infectious diseases at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and a leading AIDS researcher who's been fighting the virus since the pandemic's beginning.
Participants are being notified that no more shots will be given. They will be followed for up to five more years to glean as much insight as possible from the $77 million, federally financed project.
It's another swerve into the ditch for AIDS researchers' on the long road to devise a vaccine that can prevent HIV infection, or at least blunt it, in a significant proportion of people at risk.
The only success so far has been in a involving 16,000 volunteers in Thailand. Published in late 2009, it showed a reduction in the rate of HIV infection by only 31 percent — not enough to deploy as a public health weapon, but a glimmer that encouraged researchers to think a protective vaccine is possible.
However, the latest big hope was dashed by these numbers: Among those in the just-halted study who got the vaccine, 41 people got infected with HIV, compared to 30 who got placebo shots.
That doesn't necessarily mean that the vaccine actually increased people's risk of HIV infection, because the difference is not statistically significant. But Hammer acknowledges that possibility.
"It's clear evidence the vaccine didn't work and may in some fashion put them at greater risk — we don't know that," he says. "The major message is they were not protected."
It may put the kibosh on the future use of an weakened cold virus, called , that was used as a vector — a vehicle carrying selected HIV genes that was used as part of the complicated four-shot vaccine regimen.
The possible riskiness of using the Ad5 vector was raised by results of an earlier HIV vaccine trial called back in 2007. That study was halted prematurely because of evidence that those who got the vaccine had higher risk of HIV infection.
The designers of the big HVTN-505 study hoped they'd avoided that problem by enrolling only people who had no evidence of prior exposure to the Ad5 cold virus. They reasoned that antibodies directed at the cold virus could have interfered with its efficacy as a vaccine vector and somehow increased the risk of HIV infection.
Other, early-phased HIV vaccine trials are using the Ad5 vector. Those will be reevaluated in light of the new findings, Hammer says.
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