Glaxo enters deal to develop cheap AIDS vaccine

The public-private sector partnership will utilize promising new technology developed by Glaxo and facilitate early research and development of GSK’s non-human primate adenovirus vaccine vector as an enabling component of an effective AIDS vaccine.

Under the agreement, the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) and GSK will collaborate to advance the development of the technology, which uses non-infectious vaccine vectors to stimulate specific immune responses directed against HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The vectors are derived from adenoviruses, originally isolated from non-human primates, which have been engineered to be non-infectious and capable of efficiently delivering genes expressing HIV proteins to the immune system.

IAVI will contribute technical expertise and funding, while researchers from both companies will collaborate to form a joint R&D team. Both Glaxo and IAVI have pledged their commitment to making any successful vaccine available as quickly as possible to developing countries at affordable prices. However, the first treatments are not expected for another ten years.

The research will initially focus on vaccines designed to elicit immune responses against variants of HIV that circulate predominantly in Africa, although the goal of the collaboration is to develop vaccines that would be applicable worldwide. After pre-clinical evaluation, Glaxo and IAVI plan to conduct Phase I clinical trials of the vaccine candidates. The partners hope this will be the first phase of a collaboration that could be much broader.