The four-decades long effort to create an HIV vaccine suffered a blow last week with news that Janssen Pharmaceuticals, a division of Johnson & Johnson, was discontinuing the only current late-stage clinical trial of a vaccine. Results showed it to be ineffective.
“I was disappointed in the outcome,” says Mitchell Warren, executive director of AVAC, an organization that advocates for HIV prevention to end AIDS. “It was a setback in the search for a vaccine.” So it’s back to the drawing board with several early, small-scale clinical trials underway and more that might eventually enter the research pipeline.
Since 1982, when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control first named the syndrome “AIDS,” there have been years of fear and death that gave way to startling scientific advancements in understanding and treating AIDS.
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