An HIV/AIDS vaccine has been under development in Canada for some time now. At the moment, it has passed all requisite safety tests on animals. The next step is human testing in the US, for which approval is being awaited.
“It is a very important milestone for us,” said Yong Kang, a professor of microbiology at the University of Western Ontario in London. He has been working on the vaccine for 20 years.
Kang said he expects to get the go-ahead soon from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to begin human toxicology tests and two phases of clinical trials in the United States.
It is important that the drug passes all these three tests to get approval from FDA. If it does pass all three tests and does get approval from the FDA, it would take another decade to be made available to the general public. Kang relayed this information on phone while attending a conference in South Korea.
It has been reported in a 2008 United Nations report on the global AIDS epidemic that 33 million people were living with HIV in 2007. Also, over 2 million deaths have been caused that have been related to the disease.
There have been many attempts to create a vaccine for HIV/AIDS, but so far none have been successful. In fact, many drugs have even passed the animal testing phase, but most have been untested on humans so far. A promising trial in 2007 by pharmaceutical giant Merck and Co. was shut down after those receiving the vaccine contracted HIV at a higher rate than those who received the placebo.
Kang has partnered with a Curacom, a South Korean holding company, that has agreed to open an office in London, Ont., to help fund research in Kang’s lab and commercialize the vaccine.
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