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Dr. Sanjay Gupta: Clearing up AIDS vaccine results
(CNN) -- The initial results of a three-year trial of an AIDS vaccine showed the experimental treatment failed to protect most high-risk people, but the results for blacks and Asians indicate promise. Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta spoke Monday with CNN Anchor Fredericka Whitfield about the research from VaxGen Inc. GUPTA: One of the most widely anticipated trials, this is the first phase-three trial looking at a large number of humans to actually find out if this vaccine would work. It's been going on since 1998; participating were 5,400 people overall -- about 5,100 men and about 300 or so women. The results are a little bit confusing, for sure. Let me just show you the covers of two newspapers. If you look at USA Today, it says, "Vaccine for AIDS shows promise," whereas the cover of The New York Times front page says, "Large trial finds AIDS vaccine fails to stop infection." There's a little bit of confusion on this. Let me see if I can put it in perspective. Essentially, what they were shooting for was to find at least a 30 percent reduction in overall infection rates among everybody -- among all 5,400 people. They didn't get anywhere near that. In fact, they found about a less than 4 percent overall reduction. But the sort of interesting thing here, and what people are sort of focusing on, is that there's a disparity among different racial groups. Blacks and Asians, in particular, appeared to have more protection than whites and Hispanics. Now there were only about 300 or so blacks in the study and only about 77 Asians. Those numbers are very small. But the authors, as well as the investigators, concede that among African-Americans at least, there appear to be some statistical significance in terms of protection. Simply put, this vaccine does seem to offer some protection among African-Americans. Among Asians, it's going to require further study to actually see. But overall [there's] less than a 4 percent reduction in the vaccine. That's not enough probably to get this thing approved [by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration]. WHITFIELD: So they talk about further study. Are they also talking about perhaps having more minorities, having more Asians, having more African-Americans [in the studies]? GUPTA: Yes, that's exactly right. There are two questions. Why the difference? Is it that the virus itself is a different subtype of the virus that infects African-Americans and Asian-Americans? Or are those people somehow genetically responding to the virus differently, their bodies actually adapting to the vaccine better? They don't know the answers, but exactly what you said, Fredricka -- the numbers are going to need to increase to find out if these benefits still play out. They don't know that yet. WHITFIELD: All right, [they're] still trying to figure out whether this really is a significant breakthrough. GUPTA: It doesn't appear to be. And you can see the headlines in the newspapers: One says, "Promise"; one says, "Fails." WHITFIELD: Right. GUPTA: It's sort of teetering right on that balance there.
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