At a media briefing held in Johannesburg on 31 August 2007, Prof Gavin Churchyard of the Aurum Institute for Health Research and the University of KwaZulu-Natal reported preliminary results from an HIV vaccine study that was conducted in sites through Africa and the Americas, including Klerksdorp, Soweto and Cape Town. The results showed that the vaccine demonstrated a strong immune response, meaning that within people who received the vaccine, their bodies responded by ‘turning on’ the system that fights infection.

In SA, 240 people participated in the study, known as HVTN 204, sponsored by the HIV Vaccine Trials Network of the US NationaI Institutes of Health. This was a phase II study. A future larger-scale HIV vaccine study involving more volunteers will investigate how effectively the vaccine can actually fight HIV infection.

“These early results are very exciting and very encouraging for everyone who looks forward to a vaccine to prevent HIV infection, said Gavin Churchyard, MB BCh, FCP, MMed, PhD, principal investigator at the Aurum Institute for Health Research in Klerksdorp. “While we are still years away from a licensed vaccine, the people of South Africa are playing a key role in finding that vaccine by volunteering to participate in these studies.”

The Aurum Institute for Health Research is a trial site in the global HIV Vaccine Trials Network (HVTN) and also of the South African AIDS Vaccine Initiative (SAAVI).

Prof Churchyard has served as the co-chair of this vaccine study, leading the international study with Dr Michael Keefer of the University of Rochester in the United States.

Details on the HVTN 204 study
The HVTN 204 vaccine trial was designed to look at the ability of the candidate vaccine to induce an immune response to HIV. The vaccine, a multiclade, multigene candidate HIV-1 vaccine, was developed by researchers of the Dale and Betty Bumpers Vaccine Research Center (VRC). The VRC is part of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which is a component of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The candidate vaccine consists of an immunising ‘DNA prime’, which contains several genes from three different clades of HIV-1. Three doses of the prime are injected over a three-month period and followed three months later by a final single ‘boost’ injection that contains modified, safe, replication-defective adenoviruses carrying HIV-1 genes that match those in the DNA prime.

At the AIDS Vaccine ’07 conference, held in Seattle 20-23 August 2007, several of the scientists who conducted clinical trials of this candidate vaccine discussed their methodology and presented preliminary data on safety and immune responses to the vaccine among volunteer subjects in the various trial locations. Preliminary analysis of available data from these studies indicates that the vaccine candidate is well-tolerated and induced T cell responses in about 70 per cent of those who received it.

About HVTN
The HVTN is an international collaboration of scientists and institutions whose goal is to accelerate the search for an HIV vaccine by sharing trial results and facilitating parallel, concurrent testing. The HVTN is funded through a collaborative agreement with the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the U.S. National Institutes of Health. The HVTN comprises more than 25 research institutions worldwide, co-ordinated from its headquarters at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, USA.

About SAAVI
The South African AIDS Vaccine Initiative (SAAVI) was formed in 1999 as a lead programme of the Medical Research Council (MRC) of South Africa. Primary funding was received from the Department of Health (DoH), the Department of Science & Technology (DST) and Eskom. The European Union, Transnet and Impala Platinum also fund SAAVI.

SAAVI was established to co-ordinate the research, development and testing of AIDS vaccines in South Africa. SAAVI is based at the MRC and is working with key national and international partners to produce an affordable, effective and locally relevant AIDS vaccine in as short a time as possible.