Eight volunteers involved in trials of an AIDS vaccine in southwest China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region received results from their final blood tests and physical checkups at the regional disease control and prevention center over the weekend, with no side effects reported.

"We have initially demonstrated the vaccine's safety on the selected eight individuals," Liu, the center's HIV/AIDS department director, told China Daily yesterday in a telephone interview, " But we still need further research to see if antibodies have developed in them."

She said it was too early to call the trial a success, contradicting some Chinese media reports, and that the results are still being analyzed.

Altogether, 49 volunteers, aged from 18 to 50, are participating in the first trials of their kind in China, she said.

The State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA) approved the initial clinical trial last November. The eight volunteers, four each women and men, were injected with either the vaccine or a control solution on March 12 in a "double-blind" test, where neither volunteers nor administering doctors know who received which.

International AIDS vaccine research began in the 1980s, and since the first trial started in 1987, over 50 candidate vaccines have been studied in more than 70 government-funded clinical trials. None has so far proven to be applicable.

(China Daily September 13, 2005)