Hopes for AIDS Vaccine Still Alive Despite Setbacks

At the same time, money continues to pour into HIV vaccine research, either from private industry or from nonprofit sources such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, IAVI, and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

The failures of the past have also toughened the science, the experts said.

"Over the past year or two, there have been a lot of calls for a return to basic science, rather than [quickly] testing candidates in people," Johnston said. "It all comes back to a question of doing our homework in basic research, so that we can really come up with a strong candidate that we can have a lot more optimism for."

Gallo agreed.

"There were a number of people in the past who were thinking naively that anything was going to work," he said. HIV has proven much tougher than that, of course. "However, I still believe that a vaccine is do-able, or I wouldn't be working on it," he said.

More information

Find out more about the search for an AIDS vaccine at IAVI.

SOURCES: Wayne Koff, Ph.D., senior vice president, research and development, International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, New York City; Robert Gallo, M.D., director, Institute of Human Virology, University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore; Rowena Johnston, Ph.D., vice president, research, Foundation for AIDS Research (amFAR), New York City