Washington Post (08/20/93) P. A20
With intense opposition from officials at the National
Institutes of Health, large-scale testing of an AIDS vaccine
will begin early in 1994. The vaccine, called VaxSyn, is a
product of MicroGeneSys, a Connecticut pharmaceutical company.
Scientists at NIH studied the results of previous, smaller
studies and concluded that the vaccine did not demonstrate
enough promise to warrant a large-scale trial. Officials at
the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, however, disagree,
claiming that they had encouraging results from the earlier
tests. MicroGeneSys lobbied Congress and was rewarded with a
$20 million appropriation to conduct the trials, which may
take up to four years and will directly study 5,000 to 10,002
HIV-infected patients.