The trial, called ‘STEP’, was halted in September 2007 because preliminary results suggested that people who had been given the vaccine were more likely to be infected with HIV than people who had been given a placebo.

The researchers behind the study, from Imperial College London, King’s College London and Royal Holloway, University of London, say their findings mean scientists may have to rethink other vaccines they are developing for diseases like HIV, tuberculosis and malaria, which are delivered in the same way, using the same virus ’shell’.

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The researchers from Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachussetts; Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico; and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Bethesda, Maryland detail their findings in the October 2009 issue of the Journal of Virology.

HIV-1 replication peaks during the period of primary infection, therefore it is estimated that 50% of sexually contracted HIV-1 cases occur when the individual transmitting the virus is newly infected. No vaccines capable of inducing antibodies that completely neutralize a variety of HIV-1 isolates are currently available, however prior studies show that vaccine-elicited, virus-specific T-lymphocyte populations can limit viral replication during primary infection in nonhuman primates.

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Herpes simplex virus 2 (HSV-2) typically causes genital herpes, a chronic, life-long, viral infection. Although studies indicate that consistent condom use reduces the spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases such as chlamydia and gonorrhea, the effectiveness of preventing the transmission of HSV-2 through condom use is less certain, according to background information in the article.

Emily T. Martin, M.P.H., Ph.D., of Children’s Hospital Research Institute and the University of Washington, Seattle, and colleagues analyzed data from six HSV-2 studies to assess the effectiveness of condom use in preventing the virus. The studies included three candidate HSV-2 vaccine studies, an HSV-2 drug study, an observational sexually transmitted infection (STI) incidence study and a behavioral STI intervention study. These yielded results from 5,384 HSV-2-negative individuals (average age 29) at baseline for a combined total of 2,040,894 follow-up days.

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Jean-Christophe Plantier of the University of Rouen in France, along with colleagues from the University of Manchester in the U.K. and three French hospitals (Hôpital Louis Mourier, Hôpital Bichat, and Hôpital Saint-Louis), identified the new form of HIV in a patient from the African country of Cameroon.

The new virus is closely related to the known gorilla simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV). This gorilla strand shows no evidence of recombination with other HIV strains or with chimpanzee SIV. The human prevalence of this new form of HIV remains to be determined.

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