that would sanction clinical trials of AIDSVAX, and after negotiating with AIDS-plagued officials in Africa and Asia, landed upon Thailand. Initial Phase II trials of AIDSVAX B/B alone in the US and AIDVAX B/E alone in Thailand were unsuccessful, with both vaccines failing to either prevent or weaken HIV infection, so instead VaxGen began Thai trials of AIDSVAX B/E in combination with the Aventis-Pasteur vaccine, ALVAC-HIV, that uses genetic elements of several different HIV strains encapsulated in a canarypox virus vector. AIDSVAX B/E, moreover, contained elements of the HIV strain peculiar to Thailand's victims, E, as well as one common in the US, B. A report published in the December 2009 New England Journal of Medicine on this Thailand clinical trial, also known as the RV144 trial, of the vaccine known as "ALVAC-AIDSVAX B/E" showed the combination treatment's efficacy ranging from 26.1 to 31.4%, which though far from optimal makes the combination AIDSVAX-Aventis vaccine one of the first important milestones in the world's struggle to produce a globally effective HIV vaccine. However, during the study seven participants were removed from the study when the results showed they had already been found with an HIV-1 infection at baseline, which changed the result from 26.1 to 31.4% vaccination efficacy. References HIV vaccine research