Clinical experience with therapeutic AIDS vaccines

Recently, there has been a renewed interest in therapeutic vaccination as an adjunct or alternative to current treatment options for HIV. The first immunotherapeutic trial relevant to this topic was published in 1983. Since then, several dozen therapeutic vaccine trials have been carried out. The results have consistently shown that although in vitro-measured HIV-specific immune responses were evident as a result of vaccination, clinical improvement has been seldom observed. The instances of apparent clinical benefit however, were invariably associated with the usage of vaccines that acted in accord with the principles of allo- or autoimmunization. The majority of these vaccines were derived from the blood of HIV carriers or a cell culture and therefore inherently contained host-cell antigens unrelated to HIV. These observations raise the issue of whether this clinically successful approach has been unduly neglected. Most commercial vaccines on the market today are made the old-fashioned way, but very little support or attention has been given to the development of such vaccines for AIDS therapy. The current strategy, biased toward vaccines which have shown little evidence of clinical efficacy, is shortsighted and needs to be revised.