For the past several years, an international team of scientists has been trying to perfect a vaginal gel that a woman could apply before sex to prevent HIV transmission. Up until now, this method was prohibitively expensive. But that cost factor has been significantly reduced according to new research described at the Boston conference, yesterday.
Lead researcher Michael Lederman of Case Western Reserve University says costs may drop from dollars a dose...to pennies a dose.
LEDERMAN: We're delighted that we can now have an approach to make this in a less expensive way, but it still means that we have to go through safety studies in humans before this can go into large scale studies.
That's probably several years away. Lederman hopes to finish the testing phase before the end of the decade.
