The HIV Vaccine Trials Network (HVTN) is a non-profit organization which connects physicians and scientists with activists and community educators for the purpose of conducting clinical trials seeking a safe and effective HIV vaccine.

Collaboratively, researchers and laypeople review potential vaccines for safety, immune response, and efficacy.

At the HVTN, many current vaccine studies are using products with a safety record that has been established in previous human trials.

[6] The Nuremberg Code, the Declaration of Helsinki, and the Belmont Report are legal documents written in layman's terms which local governments use to model their laws for establishing rules for conducting clinical trials, and all contemporary clinical trials of international worth follow all the rules set by these precedents.

The CAB is similar to an Institutional Review Board (IRB) in that the researchers facilitate the granting of public data to both entities, but the difference is that the IRB consists of a professional ethics committee and the CAB consists of any community member who wants to supervise the safety, ethics, efficacy, or any other aspect of the research.