The vaccine, primarily intended for use in the third world, has enormous implications in future laboratory research into this disease. Any pharmaceutical product designed for use in the developing world needs to be robust, safe, convenient to use and resistant to the extremes of climate likely to be encountered.
Latest statistics show that every day more than 14,000 people become infected with HIV, with 95 per cent of these coming from developing countries. More than 40 million people have already been infected world-wide.
Critically, in sub-Saharan Africa, the worst affected region, around three quarters of young people infected are female, making the prevention of male to female transmission of the virus a priority issue. Tragically, not only women but also their unborn children are at high risk of contracting the AIDS virus.
The system enables a drug or other agent, such as a vaccine, to be continually delivered to vaginal tissue at a pre-determined rate over long periods of time, in some cases for up to a year.
Scientists will design and engineer HIV-1 vaccines to specifically target and activate immune cells resident in the tissue lining the vagina, leading to a new concept where the vaccine is formulated as a needle-free topical or surface product rather than as an injection.
It is hoped that continuous, controlled vaginal delivery of such a specially engineered vaccine, which has never been tried before, will provide immunity where it is most needed, at the site of viral entry, and in turn induce whole body immunity.
"We need to design products capable of economic mass manufacture to international standards of pharmaceutical quality," said Professor David Woolfson, the lead member of the research team based at the School of Pharmacy at Queen's University, Belfast.
"In addition, we know that conventional immunisation by one or more injections of a vaccine has not so far been successful with HIV, due to the ability of the virus to mutate rapidly."
Woolfson added that continuous vaccine delivery to induce immunity where the virus first enters the body is an exciting concept but it will take time as well as multi-disciplinary scientific skills.
The consortium will be working for the next five years on the project hopefully leading to successful initial clinical trials of candidate vaginal HIV/AIDS vaccine formulations.