Approaches to vaccine design are discussed in the HIV & AIDS Treatments Directory and are also summarised in IAVI’s Scientific Blueprint 2000.

Traditional approaches to vaccine design – live attenuated or whole inactivated viruses – have been difficult to pursue with HIV. The emphasis is therefore on novel designs, which are typically developed by academic researchers in the public sector and then taken forwards by biotechnology companies. The expectation is that if a vaccine were to prove successful, larger pharmaceutical companies would step in to fund and manage the later stages of vaccine development. Their role is therefore discussed in relation to accessing vaccines, later in this chapter, although there is an overlap since companies such as Aventis Pasteur and Merck are actively developing new vaccine candidates of their own.