For the first time ever an experimental HIV vaccine has turned up positive results in trial. After decades of disappointments, the findings are a morale boost for AIDS scientists.

The findings from a study involving more than 16,000 volunteers in Thailand showed a 30 percent reduction in the rates of infection. Half the volunteers received the vaccine while the other half received a placebo. Three years later researchers say the vaccine group had 51 people infected, while the unvaccinated group had 74.

Optimism
It may not seem like much, but it’s statistically significant and has injected AIDS researchers with a much-needed burst of optimism.

“What we have here is some hope that a vaccine may be feasible in the future,” says Professor Frances Gotch of Imperial College London.

Listen to the interview with Professor Gotch

Dr Gotch says an HIV vaccine has been elusive in part because safety concerns have prevented researchers from conducting human trials with a vaccine that has worked well in monkeys. Scientists were forced into other avenues of research, none of which have so far appeared to work.

“Many of us wondered if a vaccine was ever going to be feasible, or if we would have to work on other methods for preventing HIV infection. This data makes us think that perhaps a vaccine is possible.”

Hope
We might be “jumping the gun,” Dr. Gotch says, as a vaccine is probably still more than a decade away. But not only will the results reenergise scientists, they may also encourage investors – government and private sector –  who had begun putting their money elsewhere, Dr Gotch says.

“Without this kind of data, understandably people have to choose where to put their money, and perhaps people might well have thought, justifiably, that other means of preventing HIV infection might be a better way to spend their money."

While vaccine research had stagnated, great strides have been made in other areas, such as microbicides and drugs that prevent mother-to-child HIV transmissions.

“Education and prevention work, that we do know. But I think everybody realises that a vaccine is what we’re ultimately looking for and now, with this kind of data, it looks hopeful, and hope is a great thing.”

33 million people around the world have HIV, which is crippling to societies where it is endemic. Vaccines have in the past all but eradicated other viruses, and now there is a newfound optimism in the fight against AIDS.

Top photo: The undated picture shows an image from an electron microscope, enlarged by a factor of 240,000, of HIV, which causes the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome Aids.