AEGiS-AIDSWeekly: Conference Coverage (Vancouver AIDS Conference): Genentech HIV Vaccine Safe, But Three Thai Subjects Get HIV

Conference Coverage (Vancouver AIDS Conference): Genentech HIV Vaccine Safe, But Three Thai Subjects Get HIV

AIDSWEEKLY Plus, 23 September 1996
Daniel J. DeNoon, Senior Editor

Three of the 33 subjects in Thailand's Phase II trial of the Genentech HIV vaccine became infected with HIV.

None of the infections were caused by the vaccine, which contains only the gp120 envelope protein of HIV-1 clade B strain MN. All of the infections were caused by HIV-1 strains belonging to clade E.

The trial was not designed to test the efficacy of the vaccine, and recipients of the vaccine were not expected to become immune to all strains of HIV.

"Two of the volunteers were infected after [receiving] the second dose and one was infected after the third dose," said Sricharoen Migasena of the Mahidol University Faculty of Tropical Medicine, Bangkok, Thailand.

Migasena spoke during a presentation to the XI International Conference on AIDS, held July 7-12, 1996, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

The trial enrolled 33 HIV negative volunteers recovering from intravenous drug use at drug treatment centers run the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration. Eleven of the volunteers served as controls and the other 22 received 300 (micro)g of the Genentech gp120 HIV-1 vaccine.

The vaccine was remarkably safe, and no adverse reactions to the vaccine occurred.

"Antibodies against the V3 loop and CD4 blocking antibodies developed in 87.5 percent of the subjects after the third dose," Migasena reported. "MN neutralizing antibodies were induced in 80 percent after the second dose and in 100 percent after the third dose."

These responses were as good or better than those seen in HIV negative recipients of the Genentech vaccine in U.S. trials.

Migasena said she hoped that a Phase III trial of the Genentech vaccine could begin in Thailand in 1997.

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