AIDS Vaccines Fail Key Laboratory Tests

Promising vaccines against the AIDS virus have failed in key laboratory tests, raising the possibility that large-scale trials may be delayed, researchers report.

Several vaccines that had triggered neutralizing antibodies in tests against laboratory strains of the AIDS virus did not have the same effect when tested against fresh virus that had been taken from patients, researchers reported at a recent conference sponsored by the National Institutes of Health.

“It certainly does make me anxious about going forward with large-scale efficacy trials,” Dr. Anthony Fauci told Science magazine. Fauci is head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, the lead health institute agency in the fight against AIDS.

Science, the journal of the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science, says in a report to be released today that three new studies have shown that vaccine injected into healthy volunteers caused the production of neutralizing antibodies that were effective against laboratory strains of the AIDS virus.

But the same antibodies were ineffective in lab tests against “primary field isolates,” or fresh strains of AIDS virus that had been taken recently from the blood of patients. This test is considered to be a more realistic challenge of the vaccine because the general population has strains of the virus that may differ slightly from those used in the laboratory.

“We all had anticipated that (the neutralizing antibody) . . . against the lab strains would translate to field isolates,” Dr. Dani Bolognesi, a Duke University AIDS researcher, told Science.

In addition to the tests at Duke, similar studies with similar results were conducted by researchers at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and at the Chiron Corp. in California, Science reported.