GenVec Inc., a biotech company based in Gaithersburg, Md., reports it has launched a human safety study of a new AIDS vaccine designed to promote immunity to different strains of HIV. GenVec is manufacturing the vaccine under a $30 million contract with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a unit of the National Institutes of Health. NIAID Director Anthony Fauci said that while monkeys inoculated with the vaccine were not shielded from infection, they were protected against fully developed disease.

C. Richter King, GenVec's vice president of research, said scientists will inject the vaccine into 36 healthy volunteers, most from the Washington area. The subjects, who will receive increasing doses, will be tracked for side effects and immune responses.

The vaccine is engineered to work against HIV clades A, B and C - the three main subtypes found in patients around the world - and to provoke a broad protective response. One kind of defense would come from the neutralizing antibodies that keep HIV from infecting healthy cells. Another would come from T-cells that seek and destroy HIV-infected cells.

The vaccine does not contain any infectious HIV particles, only some of HIV's genes. It uses as its vehicle an adenovirus, cause of a common cold, which has long been used in vaccines and gene-therapy research and generally is considered safe. Questions about the technique arose after the 1999 death of an 18-year-old man in a University of Pennsylvania gene-therapy experiment; however, King said that experiment delivered large amounts of adenovirus directly into the liver of the subject, who had a metabolic disorder. The HIV vaccine study will use much smaller quantities of adenovirus administered via a standard intramuscular injection.

King said the technology for the multipronged approach came from the laboratory of Gary Nabel, head of the Vaccine Research Center at NIH. The $30 million NIH contract includes production of vaccines for both AIDS and SARS.