'Significant progress' reported in developing AIDS vaccine

Significant progress has been reported in developing a vaccine to prevent AIDS. Scientists of the Tuberculosis Research Centre (TRC) are working at the first phase of clinical trials for a vaccine to prevent AIDS.
Preliminary results of phase one trial have successfully proved the vaccine's safety and its ability to stimulate immune response. TRC director V D Ramanathan said: "The trial was to check the vaccine’s safety and also whether it fulfilled the secondary objective of stimulating immune response. We will announce the results to the world soon after we have the complete analysis of the data."
TRC is affiliated to the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), which, along with National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO) and the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), has spearheaded the vaccine trial in India.
The vaccine being tested in Chennai has been designed by a Kolkata-based ICMR scientist. To date, there have been at least nine MVA vaccine candidates that have been tested or are still currently in testing in labs around the world.
Controversy clouded an earlier project at Pune with reports that the trial conducted on 30 healthy volunteers continued for a year despite scientists learning even within a fortnight that the AAV vaccine had failed in tests in Germany and Belgium.
The Union government and the IAVI had signed an agreement to conduct the HIV vaccine trials both in Chennai's TRC and Pune's NARI. But, with the Pune trials being stopped, the Chennai project is India's only hope for a HIV vaccine.