The other day a friend of mine sent me this link to an somewhat somber article in the UK’s Independent, which wondered if we should stop looking for an AIDS vaccine, following the failed Merck trial of a few months ago.

The article polled 35 British and American AIDS researchers and found that, in general, they were markedly less optimistic about the short-term prospects of finding an HIV vaccine than they were five years ago. The Independent published the results of their poll one month after a US government-sponsored summit on HIV vaccine research, about which our very own Roxanne Khamsi wrote in the new issue of Nature Medicine.

I don’t know that one has to be so pessimistic. In fact, it seems that the meeting was very helpful in pointing to the limitations of the existing animal models as predictive of efficacy in humans, something that, sadly, is the rule rather than the exception when it comes down to creating models of human disease. In the context of the Merck trial, this past December we wrote this editorial, in which we indeed agreed that the field faces serious problems, but tried to conclude on an optimistic note pointing to the fact that the development of the polio, measles and hepatitis B vaccines took 47, 42 and 16 years, respectively.

Sure, the failed trial was a setback and one must take a hard look at the direction in which the AIDS vaccine field is going (in fact, very soon we’ll publish a Perspective on this topic), but this is hardly enough of a reason to call it a day. Paraphrasing Mark Twain, I’d say that rumors of this field’s death are being greatly exaggerated.

Bust of Mark Twain. (Image by wallyg)