This may help delineate patient groups for whom maintenance may be a reasonable option and may help design future clinical trials of other maintenance therapy strategies. The following are summaries of a few of these studies. They also found that the addition of 3TC to ddI does not significantly increase virologic activity compared to ddI alone. Data from ACTG 315 suggested that nearly a year of potent antiretroviral therapy was not enough to reconstitute certain immunologic responses in persons with moderately advanced HIV disease. Delayed type hypersensitivity responses, the localized inflammation that occurs when tuberculin or other antigens are injected under the skin, improved among study participants, but lymphocyte proliferative responses to HIV and other antigens did not increase.
Adjuvants enhance or modify the immune-stimulating properties of vaccines.
The only licensed adjuvants for use in human vaccines are alum compounds. Investigators in AVEG 016 injected healthy volunteers with an experimental vaccine made from recombinant HIV gp120 protein. Immunizations were repeated at one month, and then again at either two, six or 10 months after the initial injections. Volunteers also received alum, QS21 or both with each injection. Researchers reported that both humoral and cellular responses were significantly higher in volunteers who received QS21 than in those who received alum adjuvant.