Currently the global investment is approximately five hundred million US dollars per year. This cost includes industry and research agencies in industrialized countries. While this number may seem large, the investment must be increased to build capacity in “developing countries” in order to conduct trials.

Research for a vaccine has been and continues to be a long process that includes basic laboratory research, product development, and animal experiments. The next step is to test these products on healthy human volunteers through a number of phases. Since 1987, more than thirty HIV candidate vaccines have been tested in approximately sixty phase one and two trials involving more than ten thousand healthy volunteers. Presently, there are only two candidate vaccines being evaluated in phase three trials.

An ideal vaccine would be safe, accessible, inexpensive, easy to manufacture on a large scale, effective against multiple HIV clades/strains, have long lasting immunity, and be easy to ship and distribute globally.

Current HIV prevention technologies are limited in scope. Currently HIV prevention primarily focuses on either abstinence or condoms, which are effective when used correctly and consistently. Having an HIV vaccine would be an additional prevention tool providing it is safe, accessible and effective. Research has demonstrated that the use of vaccines as a therapeutic intervention tool when used in association with antiretroviral therapies could help to lower the cost of treatments and would increase long term efficacy.

No. Such a product is in various stages of clinical trials but presently it is not available for use.

An HIV vaccine would boost the human immune system so that it would not succumb to the virus that weakens the human immune system.

A vaccine is a substance used to improve the immunity to a particular disease or infection. An individual is injected with a killed microbe (bacteria or virus) which stimulates the immune system to fight against the microbe and therefore prevent the disease.