WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — A major trial of a newly developed vaccine for the AIDS-causing HIV virus is planned in South Africa, following preliminary tests that have demonstrated the vaccine is safe and that it produces an immune response, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) said in a press release on Wednesday.
"For the first time in seven years, the scientific community is embarking on a large-scale clinical trial of an HIV vaccine, the product of years of study and experimentation," NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci stated.
Because the HIV, or Human Immunodeficiency Virus, rapidly mutates, efforts to produce a vaccine have frustrated scientists since AIDS was first recognized as a global health threat in the early 1980s.
The trial of 5,400 uninfected men and women ages 18-35 years is slated to begin in November 2016, pending regulatory approval, with results of the trial available in 2020, the NIH release noted.
