New vaccine hailed as HIV breakthroughJen Kelly13feb04A...

New vaccine hailed as HIV breakthrough
Jen Kelly
13feb04

A MELBOURNE company's world-first vaccine to prevent AIDS in HIV-positive patients has been hailed as a major breakthrough.

Medical experts are thrilled by early results from the injection, which kick-starts the body's immune system to fight HIV.
Doctors say if the HIV level can be kept low, patients will avoid AIDS and live long and relatively healthy lives.

Australian researchers yesterday announced promising results of a trial of 35 HIV patients at Melbourne's Alfred hospital and Carlton Clinic and Sydney clinics.

The research offers hope in the fight against the global AIDS epidemic, which kills five people every minute, with 42 million infected.









Melbourne biotechnology company Virax's shares soared 18 per cent to 91c yesterday after the revelation, sending the company's value to $46.6 million.

Infectious diseases expert Professor Steve Wesselingh, director of Melbourne's Burnet Institute, said the treatment could be available in a few years.

"This is a major breakthrough," he said.

"This is moving from the concept of treating HIV with anti-virals to the concept of treating someone who is HIV-positive with a vaccine that will stimulate the immune system to control the virus.

"The benefit to patients is they will either be able to take fewer drugs or no drugs at all."

Existing anti-viral treatments directly attack HIV, but the new treatment empowers the body's immune system to fight it.

HIV patients currently rely on a cocktail of up to 12 tablets a day to control the virus and prevent AIDS, often with debilitating side effects.

If one tablet is missed, the treatment could fail.

"For the drugs to work you need to take 95 per cent of your tablets, which means you can only miss essentially a tablet a month, which is quite hard to do," Professor Wesselingh said.

"They also have side-effects, and you need to take them essentially forever. If you could stimulate someone's immune system to control the

virus, that would be much better than them having to take toxic medications all the time."

In the trial, HIV patients were given four injections of the vaccine, VIR201, over a year. Twenty weeks later, patients receiving the treatment had lower levels of HIV than those on a placebo.

The results were presented at an international medical conference in San Francisco. The University of NSW researchers overseeing the trials stress the results are preliminary.