Neal Nathanson, MD, presented reasons why developing an AIDS vaccine is more complex than developing vaccines for other viruses.
Clinical trials are extremely slow to do compared to efficacy trials of other vaccines.
It really takes three to five years to do a trial of an AIDS vaccine. The best time frame we're looking at is 10 years, and it could be longer. Nathanson is director of the office of AIDS research at the National Institutes of Health. According to Nathanson, there are several problems associated with developing an AIDS vaccine. In HIV, however, such a vaccine would offer little or no protection against any remaining infection because the infection typically leads to continued drops in the number of all-important immune cells called CD4 cells.