In the last year, significant breakthroughs have been made on AIDS treatment and in basic research on HIV. Cocktail mixtures of protease inhibitors and reverse transcriptase drugs have proven to be quite effective in lowering the viral load in infected individuals and showing the progression of AIDS. These new cocktail therapies are, however, quite expensive costing an estimated $12,000 U.S. per year. As such, only a small amount of HIV-infected individuals can afford these treatments. There also remains valid concerns about the long term efficacy of the new cocktail therapies. There is thus an urgent need to develop and test alternate, more effective and less expensive interdictions for HIV and AIDS. We propose to do so by developing a whole inactivated HIV therapeutic vaccine. We ill address concerns about infectivity by utilizing an extremely effective virus inactivation technology, SuperFluids(TM) CFI which has negligible impact on protein integrity and activity. The HIV vaccine manufacturing technology that we propose is quite inexpensive, amenable to large-scale processing, and quite portable, i.e. can be readily implemented in a host country site.
The development of a safe, effective, and economical HIV therapeutic vaccine will be of tremendous value to the approximately 23 million people infected with HIV, and to the public health of the United States and the world.
