A World First: Vaccine Helps Prevent Hiv Infection -produced In Bangkok!

[JetsetBkk]

For those of you who are interested New Scientist has an interesting article in a Q and A form. It's pretty good and easy to read without too much technical jargon

link here

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1784...ne-triumph.html

An interesting article, with a some realistic comments:

One slightly worrying finding is that people who did become infected had similar levels of virus in their blood whether or not they'd been vaccinated.

But lets not dwell too much on that, eh? Reading some of - most of - the posts here is like watching drowning men clutching at straws.

[Jingthing]

Yes, of course, even if this modest success turns out to be a viable path towards a reasonably good vaccine, it is still many years away from being released. It is frustrating. By the time they have a real vaccine, if ever, many of us if still alive will have lost interest in sex anyway (that works too).

[BlackJack]

for those interested in the OZ co for more info and good reading look up Starpharma

ticker is SPL on the ASX

[caf]

There is no cure for HIV, only treatment. What's scary? They chose a high risk population who just continued to live their lives as they would have anyway.

The Op is saying there is a cure. "an experimental vaccine has prevented infection with the AIDS virus"

BTW I hope a cure will be found

For the record > He did NOT. A cure for a disease and a vaccine to prevent a disease are 2 different animals, NOT a ping pong game, as you suggest.

I do agree, and the news reports state, that these 'findings' will require many years of verification before a vaccine, like polio vaccines, can be administered to everyone in the World to stop the spread of AIDS, [until it morphs]. The news reports actually stated to NOT get this confused with a cure and that it holds no hope for those who are already afflicted and the OP did use the language suggesting a cure.

As for the "Thai discovery" part, it was some Army guy, Thai or American I'm not sure, who decided to run the study with 2 vaccines that had previously been proven useless.

I can't find whether one or more of those 2 vaccines had been developed in Thailand, but suppose NOT.

If a Thai Army guy decided to throw those 2 together and it leads to a vaccine for our grandchildren and wipes out AIDS, he definitely should recognition, albeit posthumously!

I, for one, believe this study, out the $65,000,000,000 [yes that is billions] that has been spent on this disease, falls into the 'anomaly' factor; meaning out of the dozens and dozens of similar studies, you have to get one that burps at you.

The REAL medical story are the World diseases that kill way more People on the Planet than AIDS and get a SMALL % of the attention and FUNDING they throw at AIDS.

One HAS to laugh. Canada is stopping Tami flu vaccination because a recent 'study' showed it increases the risk for Swine flu.

Yes. "vaccine to prevent" and not a cure. You are absolutely right. Mea culpa mea culpa

Your last post was on the ball too.

[oldsalt]

BANGKOK – For the first time, an experimental vaccine has prevented infection with the AIDS virus, a watershed event in the deadly epidemic and a surprising result. Recent failures led many scientists to think such a vaccine might never be possible.

The vaccine cut the risk of becoming infected with HIV by more than 31 percent in the world's largest AIDS vaccine trial of more than 16,000 volunteers in Thailand, researchers announced Thursday in Bangkok.

Even though the benefit is modest, "it's the first evidence that we could have a safe and effective preventive vaccine," Col. Jerome Kim said in a telephone interview. He helped lead the study for the U.S. Army, which sponsored it with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases....

more you can read at http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090924/ap_on_...ed_aids_vaccine

p.s. I tried to post it at news clipping but was not allowed. Can some mod move it there?

regards

I have not read anywhere that the vaccine was "produced" in Thailand. The study was "produced" in Thailand, courtesy of volunteers. There will be drug companies behind it, of course, and someone, either in govt. or a deparment, will be getting consideration for their support, in one form or another.

[PeaceBlondie]

One tiny step for mankind.

[gregb]

Vaccines routinely kill people

Homeless people die after bird flu vaccine trial in Poland

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/...-in-Poland.html

I worked with Francis Crick at the Salk Institute in San Diego. Not in the same lab of course, and I was a peon, so I never actually had a conversation with him. The best I ever got to do was sit in a corner and listen to him wax philosophical, but what I do remember from this time was that he was an ego maniac. He was motivated by his own desire to see his name in history.

Still, I would trust anything he developed as being genuine. While he was getting paid an obscene amount of money at that time to sit around and think about interesting problems, he never really struck me as a business man. Today's crop of researchers however are nothing more than efficient instruments to turn carbon life forms into paper markers with dead American presidents on them. Any vaccine released in the past decade or two is as likely to be a poison as it is to be a genuine cure/prevention for anything. If a profit can be made, truth is irrelevant.

It is a sad state of affairs when you can't trust the medical and scientific profession, but this is the nevertheless where we have arrived in today's diseased culture. You can make statistics say anything if you are clever, and +/- 10 people (the difference between the 2 groups was only 20) out of 16,000 doesn't give me any confidence that this is real and not simply an attempt to steal more grant money.

Maybe in 50 years we'll know whether this vaccine actually has any merit, but I doubt anyone will find me in the queue to get shot up by today's big business pharma thieves.

If the rest of you want to be lab experiments, be my guest. But always remember that money has corrupted research today. Decide how much your life is worth before you believe anything.

[hansnl]

The results were part of the HIV Vaccine Trial Phase III on 16,402 Thai volunteers in Chonburi and Rayong provinces. Half of the volunteers were given the RV 144 vaccine in 2006, and the other half received placebos. Of those who got placebos, 74 became infected, while only 51 of those who got the vaccines did.

That scares me...

Who where these "volunteers"

Second how will they be cured?

Obviously they are infected with HIV.

I wonder if the volunteers were paid?

For example:

"Here's 5,000 baht if you take this test.

PS. You may die early if it fails"

Nice.

You know it's been an equally long time since I studied ethics, but I can't help but wonder how many of these trials will be done in Sydney, San Francisco or Amsterdam.

You would be surprised!

[Ijustwannateach]

From the terms of the trial- which included free counselling, condoms, and advice about safer sex- plus the guarantee of being treated if contracting the disease during the trial- I'd say that the participants (even with the placebos) were better off in terms of hedging their risk against the consequences of HIV infection than they would otherwise have been.

Testing vaccines and so forth is always a risky prospect, and those who participate need to be fully informed- however, without such volunteers, no vaccines would ever move to final stages (because they would never be tested before full-scale deployment). Thank goodness there are volunteers and test subjects not only in Thailand but all over the world who are willing to put themselves at a certain level of risk for the potential benefit of all of us.

What I feel is sad is that this trial is clearly publicly funded (through a government military source); it just shows that the historic problem with HIV research in the private sector remains true: it is more profitable to treat it than it is to do research to try to cure it. Thank goodness for government-funded research.

[mommysboy]

BANGKOK – For the first time, an experimental vaccine has prevented infection with the AIDS virus, a watershed event in the deadly epidemic and a surprising result. Recent failures led many scientists to think such a vaccine might never be possible.

The vaccine cut the risk of becoming infected with HIV by more than 31 percent in the world's largest AIDS vaccine trial of more than 16,000 volunteers in Thailand, researchers announced Thursday in Bangkok.

Even though the benefit is modest, "it's the first evidence that we could have a safe and effective preventive vaccine," Col. Jerome Kim said in a telephone interview. He helped lead the study for the U.S. Army, which sponsored it with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases....

more you can read at http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090924/ap_on_...ed_aids_vaccine

p.s. I tried to post it at news clipping but was not allowed. Can some mod move it there?

regards

31% !!!!.

failed again.

[Richard W]

Well, I am not a mathematician, and I do have bad spelling - however, I once saw a cartoon program about statistics, so I will have a go. Simply using a Chi squared test on the numbers presented (that cartoon was fairly detailed) gives you a bare level of significance that indicates that there is a 1 in 20 chance of the numbers falling that way by random chance.

That's reassuring - I got the same result by mental arithmetic approximating the difference of two Poisson's by a normal - 74 + 51 infections = 125 = average of 62.5 in each sample. Standard deviation of Poisson is square root of mean, so standard deviation if no effect is 8. Then 1.96 standard deviations of difference is 1.96 times 1.41 times 8, i.e about 22. Actual difference in numbers is 23, so near enough 1 in 20 chance of getting such a big difference. (Normal approximations get rather approximate in this region.)

However, the alternative hypothesis is not that the vaccine made a difference, but that it reduced the number of infections. That means there is actually only a 1 in 40 chance of the vaccine seeming to do as well as it did purely by chance.

Think I will keep the condoms handy for a bit longer.

Yep - cutting the infection rate by a third means the vaccine can only be an additional measure.

Have the infections been categorised by HIV types? I remember hearing at the start of the trial that the vaccine was more appropriate for the US than for Thailand.

[Dakhar]

But did you include the influence of the flux capicitor has making such calculations?

[caf]

The one thing that would persuade me of the statistical significance of the result (and perhaps it has merit, but I don't know) is if there is not, or unlikely to have, such 31% deviations between various samples of some 8,000 subjects. The difference between 74 and 51 would seem small enough it could be attributable to natural changes between various samples. For example, if there was another sample of 8,000 placebo recipients that had HIV infections in the 50s or 60s then we will have a different picture of the result (and in this case the "31%" will be a lot lower). This is not meant to debunk the result, but to keep in mind the margin of variation in HIV infected cases between different samples (which is an unknown) when interpreting the result.

Efectively this is what The Lancet is saying

Glad that some poster has now changed his mind and admits this is a vaccine. So it actually injects a mild form into the blood. Nothing wrong with that per se - the polio vaccine was a breakthrough with few harmful consequences - but it is important to check facts before posting

This research is importantly a step in the right direction but not to the extent the Thais are claimimg. A long way to go

[nidhogg]

So it actually injects a mild form into the blood.

No mate - definately and absolutely NOT.

The two vaccine candidates are both recombinant vaccines. I am on dial up so can't do a proper post on the nature of the two vaccines used in combination, but got this snip from the yahoo link in an earlier post:

ALVAC uses canarypox, a bird virus altered so it can't cause human disease, to ferry synthetic versions of three HIV genes into the body. AIDSVAX contains a genetically engineered version of a protein on HIV's surface. The vaccines are not made from whole virus — dead or alive — and cannot cause HIV.

People need to be very clear about this.

[nidhogg]

I worked with Francis Crick at the Salk Institute in San Diego.

Not in the same lab of course, and I was a peon, so I never actually had a conversation with him. The best I ever got to do was sit in a corner and listen to him wax philosophical, but what I do remember from this time was that he was an ego maniac. He was motivated by his own desire to see his name in history.

(snip)

It is a sad state of affairs when you can't trust the medical and scientific profession, but this is the nevertheless where we have arrived in today's diseased culture. You can make statistics say anything if you are clever, and +/- 10 people (the difference between the 2 groups was only 20) out of 16,000 doesn't give me any confidence that this is real and not simply an attempt to steal more grant money.

Maybe in 50 years we'll know whether this vaccine actually has any merit, but I doubt anyone will find me in the queue to get shot up by today's big business pharma thieves.

If the rest of you want to be lab experiments, be my guest. But always remember that money has corrupted research today. Decide how much your life is worth before you believe anything.

Watson was always the brains in that pair, and everyone knew it - which might be part of the drive of Crick for fame.

As to the current trials. Pretty much every major HIV vaccine trial in the world (including several in Thailand) has been a resounding failure. This one, if memmory serves correctly was an attempt to salvage two candidates that have failed spearately in trials. Another failure might have knocked HIV vaccine trials on the head - for the foreseeable future. In this respect, I can see that the results maybe overhyped, to allow continuation of funding for the research. The objective, an HIV vaccine is considered, generally, a worthwhile objective.

As a side note, the US army has invested considerably in all kinds vaccine research for more than 100 years. The objective of course is vaccines for US troops - so while I am not knocking their involvement, its not entirely without self interest - still that does not alter that many vaccines in common use owe a considerable debt to the US armys involvement in vaccine research.

[PeaceBlondie]

To build the Panama Canal, they needed to find a treatment that prevented malaria and yellow fever. US Army surgeons Walter Reed and William Gorgas saved the canal and started a long US Army tradition in public health.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_C._Gorgas

[caf]

So it actually injects a mild form into the blood.

No mate - definately and absolutely NOT.

The two vaccine candidates are both recombinant vaccines. I am on dial up so can't do a proper post on the nature of the two vaccines used in combination, but got this snip from the yahoo link in an earlier post:

ALVAC uses canarypox, a bird virus altered so it can't cause human disease, to ferry synthetic versions of three HIV genes into the body. AIDSVAX contains a genetically engineered version of a protein on HIV's surface. The vaccines are not made from whole virus — dead or alive — and cannot cause HIV.

People need to be very clear about this.

Read the article again carefully.

I did not say it causs HIV. But it is a vaccine and a mild form is introduced basically to encourage resistance to the main disease, in lay terms. But because it is a vaccine it can have problems - thoigh I added that in the case of polio, for example, the benefits outweigh the dangers.

The point anyway is that this is not a world first for thailand - that is hype. And it is statistically not significant. It is a step forward but only that.

[mommysboy]

"This result is tantalisingly encouraging. The numbers are small and the difference may have been due to chance, but this finding is the first positive news in the Aids vaccine field for a decade," said Dr Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet medical journal.

A difference of just 23. Just "noise". How many of the volunteers changed their life styles in the 3 years of this trial?

Yes, how many more obscene and costly blunders must the world endure.

It's a joke.

[JetsetBkk]

"This result is tantalisingly encouraging. The numbers are small and the difference may have been due to chance, but this finding is the first positive news in the Aids vaccine field for a decade," said Dr Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet medical journal.

A difference of just 23. Just "noise". How many of the volunteers changed their life styles in the 3 years of this trial?

Yes, how many more obscene and costly blunders must the world endure.

It's a joke.

I'm sure the numbers were round the right way when I first saw that pie chart. Or maybe they weren't. After digging around the BBC web site (they appear to have buried this story or dropped it like a hot potato) they have now got the numbers round the right way:

And for those who think this is a significant result, think of it this way: flip a coin 16,395 times. Do you think the difference between the heads and tails counts will be less than 23?

[Bagwan]

To build the Panama Canal, they needed to find a treatment that prevented malaria and yellow fever. US Army surgeons Walter Reed and William Gorgas saved the canal and started a long US Army tradition in public health.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_C._Gorgas

Quinine is an effective muscle relaxant, long used by the Quechua Indians of Peru to halt shivering due to low temperatures. The Peruvians would mix the ground bark of cinchona trees with sweetened water to offset the bark's bitter taste, thus producing tonic water.

Quinine has been used in un-extracted form by Europeans since at least the early 1600s. Quinine was first used to treat malaria in Rome in 1631. During the 1600s, malaria was endemic to the swamps and marshes surrounding the city of Rome. Malaria was responsible for the death of several popes, many cardinals and countless common Roman citizens. Most of the priests trained in Rome had seen malaria victims and were familiar with the shivering brought on by the cold phase of the disease. The Jesuit brother Agostino Salumbrino (1561-1642), an apothecary by training who lived in Lima, observed the Quechua using the bark of the cinchona tree for that purpose. While its effect in treating malaria (and hence malaria-induced shivering) was unrelated to its effect in controlling shivering from cold, it was still a successful medicine for malaria. At the first opportunity, he sent a small quantity to Rome to test in treating malaria. In the years that followed, cinchona bark was known as Jesuit's bark and became one of the most valuable commodities shipped from Peru to Europe.

The form of quinine most effective in treating malaria was found by Charles Marie de La Condamine in 1737. Quinine was isolated and named in 1817 by French researchers Pierre Joseph Pelletier and Joseph Bienaimé Caventou. The name was derived from the original Quechua (Inca) word for the cinchona tree bark, "quina" or "quina-quina", which roughly means "bark of bark" or "holy bark". Prior to 1820, the bark was first dried, ground to a fine powder and then mixed into a liquid (commonly wine) which was then drunk. Large scale use of quinine as a prophylaxis started around 1850.

Quinine also played a significant role in the colonization of Africa by Europeans. The harbinger of modern pharmacology, quinine was the prime reason Africa ceased to be known as the white man's grave. A historian has stated that "it was quinine's efficacy that gave colonists fresh opportunities to swarm into the Gold Coast, Nigeria and other parts of west Africa".

To maintain their monopoly on cinchona bark, Peru and surrounding countries began outlawing the export of cinchona seeds and saplings beginning in the early 19th century. The Dutch government persisted in their attempts to smuggle the seeds, and by the 1930s Dutch plantations in Java were producing 22 million pounds of cinchona bark, or 97% of the world's quinine production.[1] During World War II, Allied powers were cut off from their supply of quinine when the Germans conquered Holland and the Japanese controlled the Philippines and Indonesia. The United States, however, had managed to obtain four million cinchona seeds from the Philippines and begin operation of cinchona plantations in Costa Rica. It came too late, and an estimated 60,000 US troops in Africa and the South Pacific died due to the lack of quinine.

Carlos Finlay, a Cuban doctor and scientist, first proposed proofs in 1881 that yellow fever is transmitted by mosquitoes rather than direct human contact.[26] Walter Reed, M.D., (1851–1902) was an American Army surgeon who led a team that confirmed Finlay's theory. This risky but fruitful research work was done with human volunteers, including some of the medical personnel, such as Clara Maass and Walter Reed Medal winner surgeon Jesse William Lazear, who allowed themselves to be deliberately infected and died of the virus.[27] Although Dr. Reed received much of the credit in history books for "beating" yellow fever, Reed himself credited Dr. Finlay with the discovery of the yellow fever vector, and thus how it might be controlled. Dr. Reed often cited Finlay's papers in his own articles and gave him credit for the discovery, even in his personal correspondence.[28] The acceptance of Finlay's work was one of the most important and far-reaching effects of the Walter Reed Commission of 1900.[29] Applying methods first suggested by Finlay, the elimination of yellow fever from Cuba was completed, as well as the completion of the Panama Canal. Lamentably, almost 20 years had passed before Reed and his Board began their efforts, twenty years during which most of the scientific community ignored Finlay's theory of mosquito transmission.

Edited September 26, 2009 by Bagwan

[nidhogg]

I did not say it causs HIV. But it is a vaccine and a mild form is introduced basically to encourage resistance to the main disease, in lay terms. But because it is a vaccine it can have problems - thoigh I added that in the case of polio, for example, the benefits outweigh the dangers. .

Uh, no. Sorry, but no.

There are a number of vaccination strategies currently in use.

You are hooked up on the traditional, "live attenuated" vaccines. These are mild forms of the pathogen, that elicit an immune response to protect against the more severe form.

Other commonly used forms of vaccine include "inactivated" (the actual pathogen is killed by heat or chemical) and used as the vaccine. Subunit vaccines, which purify (by one method or another) a single part of the pathogen which is then used to elicit and immune response. DNA vaccines, etc

The two vaccines used together in the HIV trial under discussion are both recombinant vaccines. They have only a single or a few HIV genes in a backbone of something entirely else (canarypox in one case).

The vaccines are definately NOT "mild forms".

The wiki entry on vaccines (general) is reasonable. You might like to go have a browse:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine

In that article, the HIV vaccines would come under the heading "experimental"

Edited September 28, 2009 by nidhogg

[Richard W]

And for those who think this is a significant result, think of it this way: flip a coin 16,395 times. Do you think the difference between the heads and tails counts will be less than 23?

With coin flipping, the comparable difference is 256. It's a 2σ difference the right way round.

[jfchandler]

A bit more on this with comment from the U.S Army folks involved....

The U.S. Army sponsoring an AIDS vaccine trial in the Pattaya/Chonburi area provides a lot of food for thought.....

Investigational HIV vaccine regimen the first to show protective benefits

Combining two experimental HIV vaccines lowered the rate of HIV infection by 31.2% in 51 vaccine recipients compared with 74 patients in a placebo group, data from a phase-3 clinical trial indicated.

“This is the first HIV vaccine candidate to successfully reduce the risk of HIV infections in humans,” Lieutenant General Eric B. Schoomaker, MD, PhD, and U.S. Army Surgeon General, said in a press release.

The RV144 trial was sponsored by the U.S. Army, conducted in Thailand, and involved 16,000 adult volunteers.

The researchers randomly assigned participants to receive either primary vaccine (Alvac HIV, Sanofi Aventis) with a booster vaccine (AIDSVax B/E, Global Solutions for Infectious Diseases) or placebo during a six-month period. The two vaccines were chosen based on the most common circulating HIV subtypes in that region.

After a three-year follow-up period in which participants were screened for HIV every six months, findings showed that using a prime-boost vaccine regimen was safe and modestly effective at preventing HIV infection. However, it did not affect the viral load of volunteers who contracted HIV during the study.

More details from the trial will be presented at the AIDS Vaccine Conference in Paris this October. The U.S. Army in collaboration with the Thai Ministry of Public Health, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease and both vaccine manufacturers are working with experts in the field to determine how these findings will impact other HIV vaccine candidates.

“These results show that development of a safe and effective preventive HIV vaccine is possible,” said Colonel Nelson L. Michael, MD, PhD, director in the division of retrovirology at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and director of the U.S. Military HIV Research Program. “While these results are very encouraging, we recognize that further study is required to build upon these findings.”

Source: Infectious Disease News

[JetsetBkk]

^ Interesting comment from the US army. Still no mention of the significance, though.

I suppose if the results were:

Vaccine: 0 infections, Placebo: 1 infection

...they would be claiming a 100% effectiveness of the vaccine and would be starting mass production.

[BlackJack]

it doesnt matter

its years away from hitting the streets

[jfchandler]

The significance -- if the results are considered to be statistically meaningful -- is that a vaccine regimen for the first time was able to reduce the rate of new HIV infection.

In theory, if this particular vaccine approach can reduce the rate by 30-something %, there there is likely some other yet to be devised vaccine approach that presumably can reduce it 60% or 90% or 100%...

^ Interesting comment from the US army. Still no mention of the significance, though.

I suppose if the results were:

Vaccine: 0 infections, Placebo: 1 infection

...they would be claiming a 100% effectiveness of the vaccine and would be starting mass production.

[jfchandler]

That's a pretty silly/stupid comment...

You don't have children or loved ones who might benefit from this, even if it takes some more years to refine??? And even if you don't, you don't care for the health of the millions of younger people around the world for the future who might be saved from HIV, if a successful vaccine can be developed someday???

I'd say...it matters quite a bit...however long it takes.

it doesnt matter

its years away from hitting the streets

[slimdog]

Although the RV144 clinical trial is exciting, the discovery of 2 new antibodies is even more exciting.

Would totally agree with this statement.

Although at present they have only discovered the antibody in hiv+ individuals, if they can find this in hiv- individuals with known exposure then it will be a real breakthrough.

One of the big problems with a viable hiv/AIDs vaccine is that the vaccine must not produce the standard hiv antibodies, but must offer protection against the actual virus. Having new antibodies to aim for gives the scientific community a far better chance of coming up with something.

[BlackJack]

That's a pretty silly/stupid comment...

You don't have children or loved ones who might benefit from this, even if it takes some more years to refine??? And even if you don't, you don't care for the health of the millions of younger people around the world for the future who might be saved from HIV, if a successful vaccine can be developed someday???

I'd say...it matters quite a bit...however long it takes.

it doesnt matter

its years away from hitting the streets

No not silly and or stupid at all - do your homework - see how long it takes to get these things to market and how many dollars it costs - then you will see my comments are not stupid but based on facts instead of wishful thinking.

You obviously dont understand big pharma - talk is cheap and a successful vaccine is years away - (READ earlier posts)

I have invested in research companies for years and if you check earlier posts in this forum you will see that a product is coming on the market very soon - so the youngsters can ++++++ their brains out with 100% confidence that they will not acquire HIV or Herpese or HPV or babies.

Go back to your beer!!

next time dont shoot from the hip - as you will shoot yourself in the foot again sunshine.

Question - when did you last invest in the HIV research program?

[jfchandler]

I don't much drink beer, Sunshine...and I don't think it much matters how or where I invest.

The point is... a vaccine whenever it comes would be a good thing...because once vaccinated, it doesn't require any further human action to be effective.

There already is a product now that pretty much provides protection, as you put it, "so the youngsters can ++++++ their brains out with 100% confidence that they will not acquire HIV or Herpese or HPV or babies."

It's called a condom... The problem is...it takes people deciding they want to use one each and every time. And human nature being what is it, that just doesn't happen in the real world. That's where the vaccine makes a difference.

No not silly and or stupid at all - do your homework - see how long it takes to get these things to market and how many dollars it costs - then you will see my comments are not stupid but based on facts instead of wishful thinking.

You obviously dont understand big pharma - talk is cheap and a successful vaccine is years away - (READ earlier posts)

I have invested in research companies for years and if you check earlier posts in this forum you will see that a product is coming on the market very soon - so the youngsters can ++++++ their brains out with 100% confidence that they will not acquire HIV or Herpese or HPV or babies.

Go back to your beer!!

next time dont shoot from the hip - as you will shoot yourself in the foot again sunshine.

Question - when did you last invest in the HIV research program?