French researchers report that an AIDS vaccine designed to treat the disease --rather than prevent it -- has scored an initial success by suppressing the virus for up to a year among a small group of patients who tried it.

The experiment published Sunday in an online version of the British journal Nature Medicine is being touted as "the first demonstration of an efficient therapeutic vaccine against AIDS."

The vaccine was tested in Brazil on 18 volunteers who were already infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, but who were not yet taking any anti-viral drugs. After four months, the level of HIV in their bloodstreams had been reduced an average of 80 percent.

By the end of one year, eight patients in the group had maintained a 90 percent reduction in virus particles in their bloodstream. Four of those patients had virus levels so low that they were comparable to so-called "long-term non-progressors," a rare cohort of people infected with HIV who never seem to get sick.

Unlike a conventional vaccine, this one cannot block infection from occurring. However, if the French technique could be perfected, it has the potential to keep some HIV-infected patients healthy without their having to take the three-drug "cocktails" of toxic antiviral drugs.

The lead investigators in the French study are Drs. Jean-Marie Andrieu and Lu Wei, a Chinese French, of the Institute of Research for Vaccines and Immunotherapies for Cancer and AIDS, in Paris.

 
Editor: Catherine