Two AIDS advances

AIDS vaccine?

The vaccine, developed by a team from the University of Pennsylvania working with the Coulston Foundation of Alamogordo, New Mexico, and Apollon Inc. of Malvern, Pennsylvania, is already being used on selected human subjects, including those who are HIV-negative and those who are HIV-positive.

Foundation chief executive Frederick Coulston said the chimpanzee results don't necessarily mean future human trials will show similar success, but he was optimistic.

"We have a vaccine now that looks like it's the answer," Coulston said.

Researchers cautioned, however, that a commercially available AIDS vaccine was still several years away, considering that four phases of human trials lie ahead.

The vaccine uses no living HIV, so it cannot cause infection, he said. An account of the testing was published Wednesday in the British science journal Nature.

AIDS cure?

In the other AIDS study, the three-drug "cocktail" was shown to devastate HIV in the tonsils and lymph nodes, where the virus is produced and stored.

Dr. Ashley Haase of the University of Minnesota and other scientists sampled the tonsils of 10 people during treatment.

Their research, reported in the journal Science, found that within six months, the drug therapy eliminated more than 99 percent of cells actively producing HIV.

The amount of HIV stored on the surface of other cells also fell by more than 99 percent.