Today in Beijing, Dr. David Ho said it would be at least five more years before the AIDS vaccine he is researching is put into clinical use, according to Xinhua News Agency.

Ho, the inventor of AIDS cocktail therapy, told a meeting of the Society of Chinese Bioscientists in America that his team has developed two DNA vaccines. "Our vaccine has been developed to an extent that one is in human testing in New York and the second will enter human testing at the end of this year," Ho said. Human clinical testing of one type of vaccine began with 45 volunteers in November; no significant adverse effects have been reported so far. The animal study of the second type of vaccine has been completed, and Ho's team is planning human trials.

The International AIDS Vaccine Initiative is leading the search for an HIV vaccine: It recently reported that 19 countries are conducting small-scale human tests of 30 types of vaccine candidates, most of them developed in the past four years. However, because almost all are in the early phases of small-group testing, they will not complete the full trial process until 2007 at the earliest.