Africa's first large-scale HIV vaccine study

The first large-scale study to evaluate a candidate HIV vaccine on the African continent was announced by study collaborators in the USA and South Africa. The trial will involve up to 3,000 participants at five sites throughout South Africa and is expected to continue for four years.

The sites are part of the HIV Vaccine Trials Network (HVTN), which is headquartered at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, USA, and supported through a cooperative agreement with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the National Institutes of Health. The trial sites also receive funding from the South African AIDS Vaccine Initiative.

"This trial will answer several major scientific issues that face all of us in the field of HIV-vaccine development," said Lawrence Corey, principal investigator of the HVTN and a member of the Hutchinson Center's Clinical Research Division. "It will determine the usefulness of vaccines that induce high immune response to the parts of the virus that are similar between different strains of HIV-1," he added.