Sweden to develop an effective anti-AIDS vaccine

According to the United Nations, AIDS has killed 20 million people worldwide, while the world has about 40 million people living with HIV, 70 percent of whom are in AfricaAccording to the World Health Organization in 2006, 620,000 people in Brazil alone have AIDSScientists at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, a world-renowned research institution, have announced that they expect a vaccine that will effectively fight HIV within the next two to three yearsThe research project began seven years ago and clinical trials showed that 97 percent of the 40 volunteers who received the vaccine had an AIDS immune responseThe vaccine is currently being tested on 60 volunteers in TanzaniaPreliminary results showed that the subjects had the same results as the Swedish experimentBritta Warren, the scientist who led the research project, said the first and second phases of the experiment showed a very promising outlookIn the past 20 years, about 200 AIDS vaccines have been developed worldwide, but so far no vaccine has been effective in large-scale human trialsIn September, a vaccine project considered the most advanced was halted, after 13 months of trials in nine countries, including Brazil, which proved unable to stop THE hiv infectionInitially, research on anti-HIV vaccines was similar, while Swedish scientists focused on two difficulties in their experiments, says Britta WarrenFirst, HIV is a very complex virus, it has several subspecies, so the researchers decided to create a vaccine that can resist multiple types of HIV, to protect people from the most widely circulated HIV subspecies in Africa and EuropeSecond, unlike previous studies, the new vaccine complements another vaccine that enhances a patient's immune responseThe research project, in collaboration with the Karolinska Institute and the Swedish Institute for the Control of Infectious Diseases, combines two types of vaccinesPatients take several doses of the vaccine, which is derived from several HIV genes that circulate around the world, and then immediately take a second vaccine that expands the immune responseThe second vaccine contains an inoculated virus, manufactured by the National Institutes of Health and given to a Research Project in SwedenIn 2008, the Swedish research project will enter large-scale clinical trials, a process that is expected to last two yearsThe final stage is to determine the level of vaccine protection function Eva Maria Fenjo, an expert in microbiology and virology at Lund University in southern Sweden, believes the vaccine offers new hope in curbing the spread of AIDS, bringing together all the knowledge that humans now have about fighting AIDS and trying to develop different ways to fight the virus She believes that the Karolinska Institute's project differs from the vaccine developed by Merck's laboratory, for example, a different virus with the HIV-1 virus gene, which is already in use, and the Karolinska Institute, which uses three initial dosage forms that contain different subspecies of HIV-1, and a second vaccine designed to enhance the immune response (Zhang Xin)