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Meds, Mind, Body & Benefits => Research News & Studies => Topic started by: Tim Horn on September 21, 2007, 07:27:06 pm

Title: Very sad vaccine research news...
Post by: Tim Horn on September 21, 2007, 07:27:06 pm
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) made the following announcement earlier today:

Immunizations Are Discontinued in Two HIV Vaccine Trials (http://www3.niaid.nih.gov/news/newsreleases/2007/step_statement.htm)

This is actually very sad and extremely disappointing news.

Back in February and November 2003, when VaxGen's AIDSvax was found to be a failure, few were terribly shocked, as scientific work conducted while the massive trials were ongoing indicated that a vaccine that sparks an antibody (humoral) response wouldn't likely work. Since then, however, there's been reason to believe that a vaccine that illicits a cellular response to HIV -- the priming of CD4 cells to respond to HIV infection, should it occur -- would be at least somewhat effective. The new preliminary data from two studies exploring a "prime-boost" vaccine by Merck suggest that it, too, is a failure.

No vaccine to date has been able to induce effective humoral or cellular responses to the virus. This is a major setback -- one of the great disappointments in HIV research history.

Tim Horn
Title: Re: Very sad vaccine research news...
Post by: Jack85 on September 21, 2007, 09:19:57 pm
Awww, I am a participant in this research trial, looks like it's over.
Title: Re: Very sad vaccine research news...
Post by: bimazek on September 22, 2007, 12:04:27 am

Tim it is a very very sad note,

how many other vaccine possibilities are left?  How many others does this take down with it?  There are dozens of different types being tried i saw a list.... give me a little hope guy

but did they say anything about thier theory why it did not work, for example if the disease attacks cd4 and they are they are trying to elicit a immune response in cd4 then reasons why it does not work are, or could be cd4s are tramatized and confused even if not infected by the chemicals and proteins that are flowing and triggering them, perhaps they have a negative inhibitory receptor like my fav.

did they say why they theorize

also  there are so so many other trials, like the russian one with dozens of parts of the virus

also did they mention the fact that the immune system is a system and how in the heck can the poor cd4 cells do their job with getting turned on by a vaccine when the cd8s are all exhaousted and down regulated by...

a yet to be discovered mechanism or protein or something flowing in blood (or it could be just mechanical if the cd8s touch on any other immune cells it causes them to bet turned off)

that turns on the cd8 pd-1 and makes them exhausted...

esp. since this article said... this was a major watershed article in the mouse when they discovered this neg. inhibititory receptor...

  "Importantly these discoveries have huge implications for therapeutic vaccination and T-cell immunotherapy.  Because despite their enormous potential, therapeutic vaccines have had minimal to no success in eliminating chronic viral infections. The main reasons for their failure is the very limited cell population reproduction and growth potential of the exhausted cd8 T cells."

in otherwords when the cd8s are exhaused they do not clone themselves 1000x like they are suppose to...

how can the vaccine do anything but fail, like the system of a complicated thing if one part is not working the whole will not work

did they have any theories, what questions did the other scientists ask after the paper

http://forums.poz.com/index.php?topic=7475.0

from the post...

the scientists treated persistent virally infected mice with anti-PD-1 blocking antibody and monitored T-cell responses and viral control by the mouses own immune system. They found that virus-specific CD8 T-cell responses were enhanced both in number and quality by the anti-PD-1 blockade. The treated mice showed significant increases in the numbers of virus specific CD8 T cells.   And, these T cells  functioned better following anti-PD-1 treatment, and more of the CD8 T cells were capable of producing interferon IFN-gamma and TNF-alpha compared to untreated mice. Two natural molecules that do good things in the immune system to fight off things.  PD-1 blockade resulted in a substantial reduction in virus levels; the treated mice had cleared infectious virus from the blood, spleen and liver, while untreated mice still had high levels of virus in these tissues and died. Also, the anti-PD-1-treated mice that resolved the viral infection remained healthy, and did not exhibit any overt signs of disease.           Importantly these discoveries have huge implications for therapeutic vaccination and T-cell immunotherapy.  Because despite their enormous potential, therapeutic vaccines have had minimal to no success in eliminating chronic viral infections. The main reasons for their failure is the very limited cell population reproduction and growth potential of the exhausted cd8 T cells
     Meaning that even when a vaccine for treatment has been given to a virally infected body in the past and many have been tried, the CD8 T-cells do not proliferate, and increase and divide thousands of times to fight the virus because they have been turned off already by the PD-1 switch.  They have been exhausted by the PD-1.  This is one main reason why vaccines have not been effective for treatment. This provides a powerful new strategy for improving the effectiveness of therapeutic vaccinates against viruses by combining it with anti-PD-1 treatment.
 

Title: Re: Very sad vaccine research news...
Post by: bimazek on September 22, 2007, 12:11:39 am

did anyone talk about this or could thier be a relations to this...

'Runaway' Theory Doesn't Explain Slow CD4 Loss
http://www.aidsmeds.com/articles/1667_11909.shtml
more here
http://forums.poz.com/index.php?topic=12543.0

because if they are trying to get the cd4s to get kickstarted, they just found out that they dont even understand why they fall off so slow in the first place.

did anyone mention cd8s at all or pd-1 at all tim,

respectfully

your mad scientist poster bimazek who has lived for 26 years
with the trauma of lovers, best friends, mentors dying year after
year, making even the thread of life itself to seem a mere
thread of smoke or some kind of cosmic joke (or worse)

Title: Re: Very sad vaccine research news...
Post by: Matty the Damned on September 22, 2007, 12:34:15 am
Bimazek,

Your threads about PD-1 have been locked for a reason and yet here you are hi-jacking this thread in your usual fashion. Your incoherent, disjointed and nonsensical ramblings make it difficult for other people to follow the discussion. I think it most selfish of you to abuse the research forum in this way.

This might sound harsh but nobody can kill a thread more quickly than you.

Naturally you will just ignore this because you have absolutely no interest in the views or opinions of anyone other than yourself.

MtD

/edited for a typo/
Title: Re: Very sad vaccine research news...
Post by: milker on September 22, 2007, 12:41:48 am
The 25% rate of infection is interesting. It says in the study that the people involved were high risk, so i'm not surprised by the numbers. But that makes me think the rate of infection in the world must be at least 10%, which is a seriously huge number.

I'd like to thank the people that participated in this study. I'm sad it didn't work out. It will be interesting to get more medical information on how the body reacted to the injections, it's not very clear as if there was no reaction from the immune system or if the immune system was triggered but then didn't know what to do with it.

Milker.
Title: Re: Very sad vaccine research news...
Post by: LPinUK on September 22, 2007, 09:08:43 am
I read about this last night, very depressing news, for the developing world especially.

Its a shame this very important thread has been hijacked by such nonsense.

The battle against this disease is far from over.
Title: Re: Very sad vaccine research news...
Post by: J.R.E. on September 22, 2007, 01:00:22 pm

It is discouraging news. The article was in today's St. Petersburg times ;

AIDS vaccine fails; study ends
Merck's experimental vaccine, which tested a new strategy, didn't prevent HIV infection.
Associated Press
Published September 22, 2007



http://www.sptimes.com/2007/09/22/Worldandnation/AIDS_vaccine_fails_st.shtml
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


 
TRENTON, N.J. - In a disappointing setback, a promising experimental AIDS vaccine failed to work in a large international test, leading the developer to halt the study.

Merck & Co. said Friday that it is ending enrollment and vaccination of volunteers in the study, which was partly funded by the National Institutes of Health.

It was a high-profile failure in the daunting quest to develop a vaccine to prevent AIDS. Merck's vaccine was the farthest along and was closely watched by experts in the field.

Officials at the New Jersey-based company said that 24 of 741 volunteers who got the vaccine in one segment of the experiment later became infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. In a comparison group of volunteers who got dummy shots, 21 of 762 participants also became infected.

"It's very disappointing news," said Keith Gottesdiener, head of Merck's clinical infectious disease and vaccine research group. "A major effort to develop a vaccine for HIV really did not deliver on the promise."

Michael Zwick, an HIV researcher at Scripps Research Institute, said the vaccine's failure is unfortunate. But he said it's too soon to know if other vaccines using the same strategy would also fail.

"It's par for the course in the HIV field," he said of the Merck result.

The volunteers in the experiment were all free of HIV at the start. But they were at high risk for getting the virus: Most were homosexual men or female sex workers. They were all repeatedly counseled about how to reduce their risk of HIV infections, including use of condoms, according to Merck.

In a statement, the NIH said a data safety monitoring board, reviewing interim results, found the vaccine did not prevent HIV infection. Nor did it limit severity of the disease "in those who become infected with HIV as a result of their own behaviors that exposed them to the virus" - another goal of the study.

Merck's was the first major test of a new strategy to prevent HIV infection. The first wave of attempts to develop a vaccine tried to stimulate antibodies against the virus, but that didn't work.

The new effort - an approach that Gottesdiener said is being tried in most other current research - is aimed at making the body produce more of a crucial immune cell called killer T-cells. The goal is to simultaneously "train" those cells, like an army, to quickly recognize and destroy the AIDS virus when it enters cells in the bloodstream.

Zwick said some researchers still are working on vaccines to neutralize the AIDS virus. He thinks ultimately what's needed is one that combines that approach with a way to stimulate and train killer T-cells.

Merck and the HIV Vaccine Trials Network, an international collaboration of researchers and institutions funded by the NIH, co-sponsored the study. The experiment, called STEP, began in December 2004 and had enrolled 3,000 volunteers in Australia, Brazil, Canada, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, Peru, Puerto Rico and the United States.

[Last modified September 22, 2007, 02:20:56]



Ray

Title: Re: Very sad vaccine research news...
Post by: dingowarrior on September 23, 2007, 09:22:09 am
Does this mean any hope for a vaccine,be it therapeutic or preventative is out the window??
Title: Re: Very sad vaccine research news...
Post by: Miss Philicia on September 23, 2007, 01:50:31 pm
No, I don't believe so.  But it's a considerable set back.
Title: Re: Very sad vaccine research news...
Post by: blondbeauty on September 23, 2007, 06:40:31 pm
Dr. Gatell`s team is developing a vaccine in Barcelona. He talked today about this. According to him this might be because when this vaccine started to be developed it was thought that the genes of the  covering of the virus were the most important to induce an immune response. Now it is known that those are not the most important genes in the virus to be recognized by the immune system. This failure should not be a surprise. In fact it was something predictable with today's knowledge. The target was not properly selected from the beginning. New vaccines are on the way but we will still have to wait for another 5 years.
http://www.lavanguardia.es/lv24h/20070923/53396626576.html
But I think the cure is a Resistance proof pill with the price of a multivitamin.
Title: Re: Very sad vaccine research news...
Post by: ronaldinho on September 23, 2007, 11:38:07 pm
The trials that were halted concerned preventive vaccines, tested in people that were initially hiv negative. What about the therapeutic vaccines that are currently being studied to be used in people that are already HIV+? Does anybody know  the impact of the  failure of these two trials in the studies involving therapeutic vaccines?
Title: Re: Very sad vaccine research news...
Post by: J220 on September 24, 2007, 08:08:46 am
The trials that were halted concerned preventive vaccines, tested in people that were initially hiv negative. What about the therapeutic vaccines that are currently being studied to be used in people that are already HIV+? Does anybody know  the impact of the  failure of these two trials in the studies involving therapeutic vaccines?

Too early to tell, but there are always different ways at seeing the glass (half full vs. half empty). Yes this is dissapointing but now we know that this approach may not work - although as BB states it was probably already suspected, and even then there are difference of opinions as some scientists are not ready to discard this approach. But at least they can leave this one behind and see that researchers focus on a different path.

There are still plenty of other trials out there with different methodologies that could yield results. And even then when I personally, feel down about it I think about my "back-up", the Virxsys gene therapy, which is going real well. This seems to work, and even if it's not a cure, it will make the infection a latent never-manifested one, and better yet, as time goes by the modified hiv-resistant immune cells multply more and more, as the infected ones die off, resulting in less and less pathogen in the body, and who knows maybe until there is none left. And in the meantime you will be drug and symptom free, for good. So it's the complete reversal of the nominal disease progression. There's plenty of reason to be optimistic out there. J.

p.s. not intended as a thread hijack, just a "footnote". Cheers, J.
Title: The Discontinuance of Merck’s HIV Vaccine Trial Information
Post by: brooklynpoz on September 26, 2007, 08:38:05 am
Hi Everyone,

 As some have heard, Merck's Vaccine Trial was stopped, and I came across GeoVax's comments on this, and what they are doing to proceed with their vaccine trails. Seemed interesting. Here is the link......

http://www.geovax.com/newsroom/press_release_trial_response_sep07_web.pdf

Frankie
Title: Re: Very sad vaccine research news...
Post by: ronaldinho on October 11, 2007, 08:39:29 am
Effect of Merck's Failed International HIV Vaccine Trial on Research and Development

http://thebody.com/content/art43474.html

According to Mark Feinberg, Merck's vice president for Medical Affairs for Vaccines and Infectious Diseases, an estimated 90% of vaccine studies were using major elements of Merck's experimental vaccine.
John Shiver, head of Merck's basic research in vaccines, said he believes that no current approaches toward HIV vaccine development are working and that a new approach is needed. The world is spending $759 million annually on HIV vaccine development, up from $150 million annually in the 1990s, Seth Berkley, president of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, said. More than 90% of the funding is coming from governments, the Inquirer reports (Philadelphia Inquirer, 10/7)
Title: Re: Very sad vaccine research news...
Post by: Tim Horn on October 11, 2007, 09:04:30 pm
Here's a link (http://www.poz.com/articles/HIV_vaccine_Merck_401_13172.shtml) to our more extensive look at the Merck vaccine failure... and why optimism certainly isn't dead.
Title: Re: Very sad vaccine research news...
Post by: Miss Philicia on October 12, 2007, 06:47:30 pm
There was also a good article in the Philadelphia Inquirer this past Sunday about how this jolted the industry, locally important as the vaccine was actually being developed in the suburbs of Philadelphia:

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/business/20071007_Ending_of_HIV_vaccine_trial_jolts_industry.html

But not to worry, Philadelphia's esteemed Wistar Institute is developing another vaccine, though if you believe Edward Hooper it's just an overdue payback to all the dead AIDS victims.