The quest for an AIDS vaccine: A timeline

HIV can be kept under control with drugs but not cured, and a vaccine to prevent infection with the virus that causes AIDS has been a decades-long source of frustration.

Following are key dates in the quest, following encouraging lab research published on Wednesday:


- 1981: US epidemiologists report the first deaths from a mysterious immune-wrecking disease later named acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). 

- 1983: Researchers in France, and then the United States, identify the virus that causes AIDS. It is dubbed the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV.

- 1987: The first HIV vaccine trial takes place in the United States, using a genetically-engineered version of an HIV protein. The vaccine is ineffective.

- 1997: US President Bill Clinton announces the goal to develop an AIDS vaccine by 2007.

- 2003: Data from AIDSVAX, the first prototype vaccine to make it to a Phase III trial, the decisive step in the vetting process, shows the formula is not effective.

- 2007: Shock closure of a Phase II trial called STEP, which tested a prototype using three HIV genes on 3,000 volunteers. The vaccine is found to be ineffective, and questions are raised that it may even have made some people more vulnerable to HIV infection.

- 2009: A vaccine called RV144, which used a prototype called ALVAC-HIV with AIDSVAX as a booster, is found to reduce the risk of HIV infection among 16,000 Thai volunteers by 31.2 percent. The benefit is considered insufficient for the drug to be pursued.

- 2013: Failure of the HVTN 505 study, a Phase IIb US trial among 2,500 volunteers with a reconstructed DNA vaccine. Three years into the trial, a review finds the vaccine does not prevent infection.

- 2015: US scientists announce success in lab monkeys with a formula called eCD4-Ig, which exploits the mechanism that HIV uses to dock onto CD4 immune cells. Macaques exposed to very high doses of the simian version of HIV were all protected.

AFP


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