Stakes Are High for VaxGen, AIDS Vaccine

Donald P. Francis is a veteran virus fighter, and HIV has been his most elusive target.

As an epidemiologist for the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the 1970s, he helped eradicate smallpox in Bangladesh, India and Yugoslavia. In Sudan, he cornered Ebola, a deadly virus that causes internal hemorrhaging. Then in the '80s at the CDC, Francis was among the first to predict an AIDS epidemic and to attack blood banks for failing to screen donors.

On Monday, Francis, now president of VaxGen Inc. in Brisbane, Calif., will reveal the results of the largest human trial yet of an experimental AIDS vaccine. VaxGen has invested about $100 million in a five-year test of its experimental drug that involved 5,400 people, most of them gay men, in three countries.

The company has closely guarded the long-anticipated results. Trading in VaxGen's stock on Nasdaq was halted Friday at $13.02, down 21 cents, pending Monday's announcement.

If the drug is shown to be effective, it could be a turning point in the AIDS epidemic, which has killed nearly 25 million people worldwide in the last two decades. Even a partially effective vaccine could slow the spread of the disease and save lives.

Many scientists doubt that VaxGen's vaccine will have any effect on the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS. They say the drug is based on a decades-old technology and an outmoded understanding of HIV. The virus -- among the most mutable known to man -- is classified into 11 distinct subtypes, and within those are countless strains. The new drug, called AIDSVAX, targets just two of those strains.

"I would find it amazing if it had any efficacy," said Caltech President David Baltimore, winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine. "But you don't know until you test it, and you could make me eat my words."

Jose G. Esparza, coordinator of the World Health Organization's AIDS program in Switzerland, said, "The scientific community is divided

The stakes are high for VaxGen, an unprofitable biotech company with no licensed products, 115 employees and about seven months of cash remaining.

VaxGen says the results of the trial are secret, known only to the few employees and consultants who worked on the data. They were sequestered while they conducted their review of documents -- including 800,000 case reports -- an unusual step to keep rumors from buffeting the company's stock.