HIV vaccines to be tested at the disease’s epicenter

An international research consortium plans to begin testing four new HIV vaccines in 2014 in a province of South Africa where the infection rate is among the highest in the world. The unusual effort to test several vaccines nearly simultaneously reflects the difficulty of finding a way to prevent HIV infection, says Bruce Walker, a Harvard Medical Scho¬¬ol professor and one of the founding scientists of a new research center opening this month in Durban, in KwaZulu-Natal province, where the tests will occur. More than a fifth of KwaZulu-Natal’s adult population carries HIV, and basing the vaccine effort there “allows us to very efficiently do vaccine trials and very efficiently get answers,” says Walker. Because the infection rate is so high, it could take as little as two years to determine if a given vaccine works. Walker estimates that only 2,000 patients will need to receive each vaccine to discover whether it offers...