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Biotech / Medical : vaccines -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: nigel bates who wrote (5)	4/3/2001 6:48:07 AM
From: nigel bates	Respond to of 26

KEYSTONE, Colo., April 2 /PRNewswire/ -- Vical Incorporated (Nasdaq: VICL - news) announced today that the company's collaborative partner, Merck and Co., Inc. (NYSE: MRK - news), highlighted the success to date of its HIV vaccine development program, which includes a vaccine based on Vical's patented naked DNA gene delivery technology. Merck presented preclinical data from its HIV vaccine program and reviewed the status of clinical trials at the Keystone Symposium, AIDS Vaccines in the New Millennium, in Keystone, Colorado. Vical's President and Chief Executive Officer, Vijay Samant, commented, ``The Merck team has done excellent work in identifying possible strategies for therapeutic and preventive vaccination against this serious disease. We are pleased that our naked DNA technology has contributed to their success and continues to be part of their development program.'' Samant went on to warn that vaccine development is a difficult and time-consuming process, exacerbated in this case by HIV's biological complexity, and that expectations must be held in check. ``But we're excited about Merck's progress so far,'' he added, ``and particularly by the growing use of a 'prime-boost' strategy in vaccine development, in which a subject is immunized with a naked DNA 'prime' vaccine followed by a viral-based 'boost' vaccine.'' Vaccine candidates in testing by a number of investigators employ prime-boost strategies using Vical's naked DNA delivery to prime the immune system and a range of secondary approaches to boost the immune response. The International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), together with the Medical Research Council's human immunology unit at University of Oxford and the University of Nairobi are conducting a clinical trial of an AIDS vaccine designed to target the strain of HIV most common in East Africa. The naked DNA vaccine is being used with a modified vaccinia virus in the two-part prime-boost vaccination strategy. Dr. Gary Nabel, Director of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institutes of Health, is exploring the development of a prime-boost approach for an Ebola vaccine. Dr Harriet Robinson at Emory University has used the prime-boost strategy successfully in monkeys to suppress the development of AIDS. Other vaccine development programs have combined the naked DNA prime with boost vaccines using modified pox, vaccinia, adeno- and adeno-associated viruses with Vical's naked DNA technology in the prime vaccine. The naked DNA technology has demonstrated the ability to induce a cellular immune response. This cellular immune response is considered a crucial element in vaccines for challenging infectious disease targets. Conventional vaccine approaches induce only an antibody immune response. Merck holds the exclusive worldwide license to Vical's naked DNA vaccine technology for HIV and selected other infectious disease targets. Merck is developing vaccines based on Vical's naked DNA vaccine technology to prevent and treat HIV infections. Merck is testing naked DNA vaccines for HIV in two human trials, one for uninfected volunteers and one for volunteers already infected with HIV and receiving highly active anti-retroviral therapy. The human testing began in December 1999. Vaccines are generally recognized as the most cost-effective approach for infectious disease health care. However, the technical limitations of conventional vaccine approaches have constrained the development of effective vaccines for many diseases. Vical's naked DNA vaccine technology may overcome two deficiencies of traditional preventive vaccine approaches, which are the inability to counteract the random changes in the strains of various infectious agents and the need for safe formulations that boost an antibody response or that cause sufficient killer T-cell responses, known as adjuvants. Potential vaccine products based on the Vical technology should be simpler to manufacture than vaccines that are made using cumbersome and labor-intensive techniques involving difficult tissue culture procedures and live viruses...