FDA Approves HIV Vaccine Study

Promising news from the University of Western Ontario.

Kang said the vaccine, called SAV001, is the first preventative HIV vaccine approved for clinical trials to use a killed whole HIV-1 virus to activate the immune response in humans. The strategy has been used before to develop successful vaccines for influenza, polio, rabies and hepatitis A. Kang said these past successes for other viral diseases provide hope the Canadian-developed vaccine will work against HIV. The human immunodeficiency virus used in the vaccine has been genetically altered to render it non-pathogenic, or unable to cause disease. Kang and his research team then further inactivated the virus using chemicals and radiation. In the past, people did not use this strategy (using a killed whole HIV virus) because people did not know how to make a safer virus and people did not know how to make large quantities of it,” Kang said. “Now we have solved those problems by the genetic engineering of the virus.”