Researchers Express Concerns About Funding Levels

Experts at the AIDS Vaccine 2008 conference in Cape Town, South Africa, on Tuesday expressed concerns that the current global economic situation could damage funding for AIDS research and vaccine development, the AP/Los Angeles Times reports.

The economic situation has "added to the gloom among experts deeply frustrated by setbacks" in HIV/AIDS vaccine research, according to the AP/Times.

There also are concerns that some groups that are large contributors to health and international development initiatives could reduce funding in light of the economic situation, the AP/Times reports. Anthony Fauci, director of NIH 's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases , said this year's NIH budget for HIV/AIDS vaccine research is $491 million out of a total HIV/AIDS budget of $1.5 billion. This compares with a $115 million vaccine budget in 1998 out of a total budget of $703 million. Although Fauci said that he does not expect the U.S. government to reduce its funding for HIV/AIDS, he added that the "increases in the budget that we had hoped for will not be forthcoming" because of the current financial crisis in the U.S.

The conference follows a year of several setbacks in HIV vaccine research. Merck in September 2007 announced it had halted a large-scale clinical trial of its experimental HIV vaccine after the drug failed to prevent HIV infection in participants or prove effective in delaying the virus' progression to AIDS. The vaccine candidate also might have put some trial participants at an increased risk of HIV. Following news of the Merck vaccine, trials of NIH's Vaccine Research Center 's HIV vaccine candidate were scaled back
Source: http://kaisernetwork.org/daily_reports/rep_index.cfm?DR_ID=55016