Hoping to join the cocktail party

The advent of highly active anti-retroviral therapy (HAART) regimens has improved the treatment of HIV patients, but it has also made it difficult for new treatments to show efficacy on end points of AIDS-defining conditions or death. But for The Immune Response Corp. (IMNR), the solution may be to focus on viral load as a primary end point.

Last week, an independent data safety monitoring board recommended halting the 2500-patient Phase III trial of IMNR's Remune HIV-1 immunogen after statistical significance was not seen on clinical end points in a second interim look. The board concluded that prolonging the study would not result in significant differences between treatment groups...