Cape Town — Developing countries with high HIV burdens should lobby vigorously for AIDS vaccine research to ensure the quest remained high on the global agenda, International AIDS Vaccine Initiative president and CEO Dr Seth Berkeley said at an international scientific meeting yesterday.

Activists in rich countries have lobbied effectively for extensive research on finding new drugs to treat HIV, but costly life-long medication was not necessarily the best solution for poor countries with high infection rates, Berkeley said.

In the absence of a cure, a vaccine offered the best hope of stemming the tide of the HIV epidemic, he said.

Developing countries such as SA and India, with the highest HIV number of cases in the world, needed to participate in the hunt to find an effective AIDS vaccine to make sure products developed met their needs, he said.

"If you leave it to someone else, it may never happen," said Berkeley, who is attending a scientific meeting in Cape Town under the banner of the India, Brazil and SA partnership, which strives to strengthen collaboration between the three countries.

The nonprofit AIDS Vaccine Initiative is one of the world's largest provider of grants for AIDS vaccine research, and has tested six prospective vaccines in 11 countries since its founding in 1996.

SA had the scientific and financial resources to participate in vaccine research, he said, noting that SA ranked behind only Ireland and the US in the percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) dedicated to public-sector research in this field.

Last year SA invested between 0,003% and 0,004 % of GDP while the US and Ireland invested between 0,004% and 0,005% of GDP, he said.

The United Nations estimates close to 40-million people are infected with HIV, more than 60% of whom live in sub-saharan Africa.

Globally, $650m was being spent on AIDS vaccine research, said Berkeley, but there was still a funding shortfall of approximately $400m.

Developing countries also needed to bolster their ability to run vaccine trials, and to improve their regulatory systems, he said.

SA is involved in developing and testing potential AIDS vaccines under the South African AIDS Vaccine Initiative. Berkeley said that it would be at least two or three years before researchers would know whether the most promising candidate vaccines were effective.

Hopes are currently pinned on prospective vaccines that use a virus to deliver scraps of HIV to the body's immune system in the hope that it would attack the full HIV-virus if exposed to it.

One of the most promising candidates in this field was a vaccine developed by pharmaceutical giant Merck that used an inactivated adenovirus, which causes the common cold, said Berkeley.

Scientists are also exploring the possibility of "therapeutic vaccines", which would keep the infection in check, rather than preventing it.