HIV pioneer warns of new vaccine's limitations

A VACCINE that targets HIV infection is being developed in the US and will likely start human trials in coming years – but we need to be aware of the limitations, according to virologist Prof Bob Gallo, co-discoverer of HIV, who will give a public talk in Cork this evening.

Prof Gallo directs the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, where researchers are working on a vaccine to block HIV from infecting host cells in humans. "I think we will make progress for a preventive vaccine, despite all the difficulty all these years," he told The Irish Times.

Researchers at the Maryland centre have been looking to target an important phase in HIV infection where the virus binds to the outside of the host cell and triggers particular changes.

“With HIV, because it integrates in 24 hours, we believe you must block completely at the beginning – and whatever is achieving that blocking must be maintained,” said Prof Gallo.

But the difficulty lies in maintaining that blocking effect over time. Results from trials with some potential vaccines suggest they could block HIV infection, but that wears off a few months after vaccination, he explained.

“We are now in a position where candidates from our institute will go into clinical trials,” he said. “It will begin in 2013, but we know its limits – we have to make the antibodies last longer. I would be profoundly disappointed if in five to six years I couldn’t answer this question definitively.”

Prof Gallo will give a free public lecture tonight at 7pm in the Boole IV Lecture Theatre at University College Cork on HIV AIDS: From Finding the Cause to Cure and Prevention – the Science that Got Us Where We are Today and the Science that Needs to be Done.

Next weekend, Prof Gallo will visit University College Dublin for the second meeting of the Global Virus Network, an initiative he co-founded with UCD’s Prof Billy Hall and Dr Reinhard Kurth, from Germany, that brings together medical virologists from around the world to address issues relating to viruses that cause disease in humans.