India Monday launched its first human clinical trials of a vaccine designed to prevent HIV-AIDS, federal health minister Anbumani Ramadoss said. "The trial is being conducted by a partnership between the government and International AIDS Vaccine Initiative in Pune," Ramadoss told the Press Trust of India news agency. The "investigational" vaccine was being tested on 30 volunteers in a first phase of the trial, Ramadoss said. "The vaccine candidate is being tested in Pune on 30 healthy volunteers in the phase I clinical trial at the National AIDS Research Institute," Ramadoss said.

India has five million people infected with the HIV virus - one in every eight of the 40 million infected world-wide - and is second only to South Africa.

The quest for a vaccine is seen as particularly crucial in India where the World Bank has warned the disease could become the single largest cause of death in the nation of more than a billion people by 2033.

The human trials focus on the sub-type C of the virus, the most common in the country, are taking place at the National AIDS Research Institute in Pune, west of Mumbai.

The vaccine, called the "Adeno Associated Vector Borne Vaccine", has been produced in partnership between the government, the Indian Council of Medical Research (IMCR), the National AIDS Control Organisation and the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), Ramadoss said. India is working on three vaccines, the minister said.

Over 20 potential AIDS vaccines have been developed world-wide but the only one to reach large-scale testing failed in clinical trials in 2003 in North America and Thailand. Many top scientists say they believe a vaccine is at least a decade away.

Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2005