New AIDS vaccine?

A new Harvard Medical School study on monkeys indicates scientists are making slow progress toward an AIDS vaccine.

The study, published in the journal Nature, demonstrated that the experimental vaccine protected some monkeys from infection and appeared to make the disease more manageable for those who weren’t protected, according to the Washington Post. The vaccine, a combination of two strains of adenovirus that normally cause colds, reduced an animal’s chance of infection by 80 percent, although infection was inevitable with increased exposure. The monkeys who were infected displayed evidence of increased immune-system resistance to the infection.

“This type of protection, and the extent of protection, in non-human primates has not been previously seen,” said lead researcher Dan Barouch. “We think this is both a theoretical advance as well as a practical one.”