A research team from Queen's University in Belfast has received funding in an effort to pioneer a novel approach to the development and delivery of an HIV/AIDS vaccine.

The team hopes to combat the devastating AIDS pandemic raging through sub-Saharan Africa and other regions in the developing world. A new approach involving a female-controlled vaginal HIV vaccine is to be tried in order to break the infection cycle and its appalling effects.

Latest statistics show that every day more than 14,000 people become infected with HIV, with 95% of these coming from developing countries. More than 40 million people have already been infected with the AIDS virus world-wide.

The Queen's team, led by Professor David Woolfson, together with Dr Karl Malcolm, Dr Gavin Andrews and Professor David Jones, has been awarded US $2.3 million to support their work on the project, as part of a US $19.7 million grant to St Georges Hospital Medical School in London from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust, under the 'Grand Challenges in Global Health Initiative'.

"These technologically advanced systems enable a drug or other agent, such as a vaccine, to be continually delivered to vaginal tissue at a pre-determined rate over long periods of time, in some cases for up to a year," Professor Woolfson said.

"Scientists in the international research consortium will design and engineer HIV-1 vaccines to specifically target and activate immune cells resident in the tissue lining the vagina, leading to a completely new concept where the vaccine is formulated as a needle-free topical or surface product rather than as an injection. It is hoped that continuous, controlled vaginal delivery of such a specially engineered vaccine, which has never been tried before, will provide immunity where it is most needed, at the site of viral entry, and in turn induce whole body immunity," he said.

The consortium said it will be working for the next five years on the project hopefully leading to successful initial clinical trials of candidate vaginal HIV/AIDS vaccine formulations.

(MB/SP)