Clinton Dedicates AIDS Research Center

BETHESDA, Md. —  President Clinton dedicated a new research center devoted to developing a vaccine against the AIDS virus Wednesday.

The Dale and Betty Bumpers Vaccine Research Center will initially be devoted to the search for an AIDS vaccine, which researchers and activists agree is the only real answer to the HIV epidemic.

Cocktails of strong drugs can hold HIV at bay, but no one knows for how long. The drugs are also expensive and have severe side effects.

In 1997 Clinton called for the development of an AIDS vaccine by 2007. “Our balanced budget will target $200 million toward this goal,” Clinton told an audience packed into a tent at the groundbreaking ceremony on the sprawling campus of the National Institutes of Health. “I am confident that this is a place where miracles will happen, miracles born of hard work, ceaseless effort, visionary dreams.”

AIDS groups welcomed the creation of the center, named after a former Arkansas senator who lobbied for immunization programs, but they said it would do little good if more money was not set aside for research in the federal budget.

“The president is patting himself on the back, but we say not enough is happening,” said Jay Blotcher, a spokesman for the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition.

Steve Wakefield of AVAC called for a tax credit to encourage private companies to work on vaccines.

When it is finished next year the center will employ about 100 scientists and support staff. Its budget for fiscal 1999 is $16.5 million.

Around the world, 16,000 people become infected with HIV every day. More than 33 million people are already infected and 13.9 million have died from AIDS, most of them in Africa, where the drugs that can hold the virus at bay are largely unavailable.

More than 45 vaccines are in experimental trials, but it takes many years before a vaccine can be tested in humans. And because HIV infection progresses so slowly, it takes longer to test vaccines for this virus than for something like smallpox.

Only one vaccine is in full-scale global human trials: AIDSVAX, developed by VaxGen Inc., a California-based company spun off from the biotechnology firm Genentech Inc.

Experts fear that AIDSVAX, which uses a protein from the surface of the virus to try to prime the immune system, will not be strong enough to ward off the virus.

Vaccines work better when they use a live but weakened version of a virus--as in polio, for example--but monkeys vaccinated with such an attenuated virus ultimately developed symptoms of immune system damage, indicating that even a damaged virus somehow reconstitutes itself to cause infection.