Kara Guzman, Santa Cruz Sentinel
SANTA CRUZ >> For 30 years, UC Santa Cruz professor and vaccine developer Phil Berman has been chasing a moving target — the insidious, ever-changing HIV virus — and now, finally, he thinks he has it cornered.
Berman’s lab has developed an experimental vaccine he believes will guard against HIV and AIDS. The model is expected to go to clinical trial within three years.
When Berman was a Genentech scientist in the 1990s, he invented the world’s first vaccine to show any success against HIV. When it was tested with another vaccine in a 2003 to 2009 large-scale trial involving 16,000 people in Thailand, the vaccine combination proved a 31 percent success rate.
