With 76.1m HIV-positive, 35m dead, optimism greets AIDS vaccine test

The three-decade-old quest for an AIDS vaccine received a shot of hope Monday when developers announced that a prototype triggered the immune system in an early phase of human trials.

Tested in 393 people in the United States, Rwanda, Uganda, South Africa and Thailand, the drug “raised antibody responses in 100 percent of vaccine recipients,” Dan Barouch, a member of the research team, said in Paris.

“These promising … data, together with advances from many other investigators in the field, support a new sense of optimism that development of an HIV vaccine might in fact be possible,” he told journalists at an HIV science conference organised by the International AIDS Society.

A vaccine is widely considered the best way of ending an epidemic that has seen 76.1 million people infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, since the early 1980s.

Some 35 million have died.

Last year alone, 1.8 million people around the world were newly infected, according to UNAIDS, and there were 36.7 million people living with the virus.