Pentagon Quits AIDS Drug Trials : Medicine: Top health agencies also opposed the program. Funds from the controversial $20-million vaccine test will go to unspecified Army research.

The Pentagon has scrapped plans to begin a third phase of clinical trials for an experimental AIDS vaccine, saying it was too soon to tell whether it was worth going ahead with the $20-million program, despite orders from Congress to conduct the tests.

Officials said the decision was announced in a Jan. 4 letter from Edward D. Martin, acting assistant secretary of defense for health policy, to the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration. Both agencies had opposed continuing the trials.

Martin’s letter said the Defense Department would instead turn the $20 million over to the Army to conduct more broadly based research on acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

He did not specify what the new research would entail, and officials said no firm decision had been made.

The program had been controversial almost from the start. Although the NIH and FDA both had recommended against conducting the trials so soon, MicroGeneSys, the Connecticut-based manufacturer of the vaccine, successfully lobbied Congress to mandate the tests.

The vaccine, known as VaxSyn, is designed only to slow the progress of AIDS, not to prevent infection with the human immunodeficiency virus that causes the disease.

The drug contains gp-160, which is made from fragments of the outer membrane of HIV in order to help attune patients’ immune systems to the virus.

Some researchers and AIDS activists had complained of political meddling in connection with the tests. Although the Defense Department has frequently conducted trials of drugs, the selection traditionally has been made by the NIH rather than Congress.

Martin’s letter was part of a package that also included recommendations by FDA Commissioner David A. Kessler and NIH Director Harold E. Varmus that the government not continue the trials involving a single drug.

An amendment to this past year’s defense appropriation bill would have required the Pentagon to go ahead with the third phase of the trials unless the Defense Department, the NIH and the FDA all recommended against further testing.