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In 2003, terrorism was a more immediate national danger than infectious diseases. Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) had just redirected $117 million from infectious diseases to fund a new anthrax vaccine effort in response to the anthrax attacks that happened a week after 9/11. The millions were just a small part of the $1.8 billion Fauci had poured into defense from bioterrorist attacks over the preceding two years. More than half of those funds were devoted to anthrax and smallpox alone. In 2004, Fauci launched the $5.6 billion “Project Bioshield,” the National Institutes of...

Small advancements make big waves in the decades-long search for an HIV vaccine, and University of Miami researchers are optimistic that their latest findings are significant: They have developed a vaccine that triggers an immune system response strong enough to kill a model AIDS virus in mice. The vaccine is still in the early stages of development, said Geoffrey W. Stone, a UM assistant professor of microbiology and immunology who led the research study published in February’s Journal of Virology. “But in those modest beginnings,” he

Dr. Dong-Pyou Han spiked a clinical test sample with healthy human blood to make it appear that the rabbit serum produced disease-fighting antibodies, officials said. The bogus findings helped Han’s team obtain $19 million in research grants from the National Institutes of Health, said James Bradac, who oversees the institutes’ AIDS research.

BANGKOK — For the first time, an experimental vaccine has prevented infection with the AIDS virus, a watershed event in the deadly epidemic and a surprising result. Recent failures led many scientists to think such a vaccine might never be possible. The vaccine cut the risk of becoming infected with HIV by more than 31 percent in the world's largest AIDS vaccine trial of more than 16,000 volunteers in Thailand, researchers announced Thursday in Bangkok. Even though the benefit is modest, "it's the first evidence that we could have a safe and effective preventive vaccine," Col. Jerome Kim said in...

WASHINGTON — Researchers must go back to the drawing board before they can develop an effective vaccine against H.I.V., AIDS experts said at a scientific meeting on Tuesday. And Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the top federal official responsible for AIDS research, agreed that more fundamental knowledge is needed about H.I.V. and the way the body and experimental vaccines respond to it before the goal of a licensed H.I.V. vaccine can be reached. Dr. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, pledged to re-evaluate the use of all $1.5 billion his agency spends on AIDS research...

BOSTON--Two prominent researchers have bluntly assessed the depressing state of AIDS vaccine research and have urged the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) to correct its course. In back-to-back plenary talks at the 15th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections today, Ronald Desrosiers, director of the New England Primate Research Center in nearby Southborough, said he thought that NIH--the world's largest funder of AIDS vaccine research--had "lost its way," spending too much money on developing and testing products and not enough on basic research. Virologist Neal Nathanson, a professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania who formerly headed NIH's Office...

Six volunteers have received a cocktail of China's experimental AIDS vaccines, signalling a new phase in the country's quest to find an indigenous remedy to fight the deadly disease which is spreading rapidly, the state media reported on Sunday. After receiving medical check-ups, the six volunteers were inoculated with the vaccines in Nanning, capital of south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, on Saturday. The volunteers will receive another three injections in the coming three months, the director of the Guangxi Disease Prevention and Control Centre, Chen Jie, said. The latest round of AIDS vaccine research was launched after a two-month...

<p>VaxGen's experimental AIDS vaccine couldn't block HIV infection among volunteers in Thailand, the Brisbane company said Wednesday, in another blow for the closely scrutinized drug.</p> <p>The vaccine, dubbed AIDSVAX, had no noticeable effect on infection rates among the 2,546 intravenous drug users in Bangkok who volunteered for the study. Nor did it slow the disease's progress among volunteers who took the vaccine and later contracted HIV.</p>