ASU professor nears clinical trials on HIV vaccine

An Arizona State University professor's potential HIV vaccine may begin clinical trials on humans as early as next year.

Bertram Jacobs began researching possibilities for HIV vaccines almost a decade ago. In 2009, he reinvented the smallpox vaccine to deliver HIV into recipients as a preventive measure. So far, his potential vaccine has been tested in a series of clinical trials with primates.

Jacobs' clinical trial is only one of six in the United States currently working with the smallpox vaccine, according to the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative. It is also one of only 22 ongoing trials in the U.S. for HIV, including medications for treating existing symptoms.

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Kirk Baxter, founder of the Southwest Center for HIV/AIDS in Phoenix, was diagnosed HIV positive in 1990. Since then, he said he has participated in multiple clinical trials to try to find a new medication that works for him. One pill, he said, almost completely shut down his kidneys.

"To have a vaccine that could prevent this from happening to other people ... it's a huge development in the overall fight to eradicate HIV," Baxter said.

"Of all of the attempts to create a vaccine, this one seems to be the most promising," Baxter said. "It would be a gift to humanity."

Jacobs, a virology professor who teaches a range of classes including an HIV/AIDS course that discusses the biology and the sociology of HIV, said his vaccine is safer than the original smallpox vaccine and that the most recent trial was "very successful."

"We saw a very good immune response and the vaccine proved to be completely safe for the primates," he said. The vaccine had very positive results in tests done on human cells as well, he said.

Currently, there are about 2 million new infections of HIV annually, and with a vaccine, that number could drop to fewer than 257,000 new cases a year, according to the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative.

The ASU professor is working in collaboration with researchers in Europe, where he said a majority of the trial testing has been conducted.

Jacobs said the vaccine will move into FDA-approved human clinical trials in the next year.

Cindy Quenneville, CEO of the Southwest Center for HIV/AIDS in Phoenix, said Jacobs' research is "wonderful."

"Having something proactive would be a miracle," Quenneville said. "Our hope is for a cure, but this vaccine could be a first step."

Currently, there are 30 million people infected with HIV, Jacobs said, with 50,000 new infections each year in the United States.

This is far from the first attempt to develop such a vaccine, however. In the past decade, there was a vaccine out of Thailand that was the first in clinical trials to provide any protection against HIV.

Jacobs said he is using the same technique as the vaccine used to eradicate smallpox — injecting it into the patient.

He also said his vaccine has shown no signs of failure or safety issues.

In addition to the prophylactic vaccine, Jacobs said he has been working for two years with collaborators at Duke University on another method of halting the spread of HIV.

Jacobs said his fellow researchers at Duke have collected blood samples every two weeks from an HIV patient, hoping to develop a process that could create antibodies to prevent the spread of about a thousand strains of HIV.