Are we on the brink of an AIDS vaccine?
A research group in Atlanta has developed an AIDS vaccine that shows 96 percent effectiveness in non-human, pre-clinical trials. The GeoVax vaccine, developed on the campus of Emory University, is already in Phase I human trials and could be on the market by 2011. It appears to address one of the biggest obstacles to fighting AIDS medically. One of the challenges involved in preventing and curing any type of virus is the rate of mutation. You can find a way to kill a virus, but unless that method involves a whole bunch of attack angles at once, it’s going to stop working pretty quickly. The virus is going escape the immune-system response triggered by the vaccine. HIV has a very high rate of mutation, so killing or deactivating it requires multiple, simultaneous attacks that can preempt or negate its ability
