The recent failure of the most promising HIV vaccine prompted scientists’ concern at the Summit on HIV Vaccine Research and Development held on Tuesday at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda.

Several hundred HIV/AIDS scientists and advocates discussed and argued how to move forward with AIDS research.

After more than 20 years of research, the inability to develop a vaccine to fight HIV/AIDS has proven incredibly frustrating for scientists.

“I think we should pull the plug on vaccine research. Do we have any other enterprise that has been studied for 25 years and for which we've spent billions of dollars where we have no results? There's no evidence we'll ever have an AIDS vaccine,” said Michael Weinstein, president of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, a private, nonprofit group that provides treatment for people with HIV, the Washington Post reported.

The debate over HIV vaccine comes several months after the drug company Merck announced it was halting two human trials of its experimental HIV vaccine. The vaccine proved ineffective in fighting the disease, as it didn’t reduce the amount of virus in people who became infected. Moreover, there were also indications suggesting it may have made it easier for some people to contract the virus.

The failure had scientists at the meeting divided in two groups: one of the groups agreed that clinical studies should continue, while the other group called yesterday for the end of government funding for HIV vaccine research.

Officials of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, which bills itself as the largest AIDS organization in the U.S. said the money should be instead spent on effective and proven strategies for HIV Prevention .

“Twenty-five years into the epidemic and 20-plus years of vaccine research and we are no closer to a vaccine. We just don’t think our tax dollars should be going to something that doesn’t have much hope, especially with science as it is today,” ," said Ged Kenslea, spokesman for the Los Angeles-based foundation.

“Despite hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars, the reality in 2008 is that an HIV vaccine clearly remains beyond our grasp. The HIV vaccine field is clearly at a critical crossroads, and decisions about our future course will affect the lives of billions of individuals in both research-rich and resource-poor settings for years to come,” Dr. Warner C. Greene, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco and co-chair of the summit, told the attendees.

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who sponsored the meeting on Tuesday, characterized the AIDS Healthcare Foundation’s position as “radical” and said that the Merck vaccine was only one of many promising avenues of research. He also added that his agency would try to set aside an additional $10 million to $20 million next year to fund grants to look into new ideas. About one-third of the NIAID’s $2.9 billion budget goes to HIV vaccine research.

Overall, the scientists seemed to agree that an AIDS vaccine is not likely soon, but it’s important to train future researchers to carry on their work