Although they have shown success, the trials are still in the early stages.
After more than 30 years of efforts, there may be promising progress in the search for a vaccine against HIV, the virus that causes AIDS if left untreated.
Now preliminary data from an early clinical trial from the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative and the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, suggests a new HIV vaccine may show promise.
“These are very early studies. But they are nonetheless provocative,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine and infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, who was not involved in the clinical trial.
While the candidate vaccine has yet to be tested in larger studies, experts hope this vaccine will pass where others have failed.
“This is a very innovative approach to developing a vaccine that has never been done before,” said Schaffner, describing the underlying vaccine technology as “some kind of pinnacle of 21st century science.”
When HIV was first discovered as a cause of AIDS in the early 1980s, researchers thought that a vaccine could be quickly made for this virus, as well as for diseases such as measles, chicken pox and hepatitis B. of health and human health. services, Margaret Heckler, predicted in 1984 that a vaccine would be available in two years. Researchers soon discovered that there were more hurdles than they initially thought.
HIV is a virus that mutates rapidly and is a moving target for vaccines. HIV also has many different subtypes, so a vaccine that protects against one subtype of HIV may not be effective against another.
The new research from IAVI and Scripps aims to address these problems by developing a vaccine that helps the body produce “broadly neutralizing antibodies.” The researchers hope to boost a person’s immune system against many HIV variants and mutations.
This study is based on “identification of a subgroup of HIV-infected individuals … who make so-called broadly neutralizing antibodies during their infection, which basically means that these antibodies can potently block the infection of various HIV-infected variants, and that is the main goal, ”said Dr. Mark Feinberg, Ph.D., IAVI’s CEO.
Their early phase, phase 1 clinical trial, which is ongoing, involved 48 healthy adults who received a total of two doses of the vaccine or placebo, two months apart. Preliminary data showed that 97% of those who received the vaccine had early evidence that their immune systems would be able to make these broad antibodies.
“The general neutralizing antibody is important because the virus can mutate so quickly that they need something that is a shotgun, not a rifle … to prevent a whole host of different types of HIV configurations,” Schaffner said.
The decades-long search for an HIV vaccine is in stark contrast to vaccine development for COVID-19, “where the science was ready and we were able to develop vaccines, plural, very, very quickly,” Schaffner added. .
The researchers at IAVI and Scripps are working with companies, such as Moderna, to leverage the mRNA technology used in the development of vaccines against COVID-19.
Sara Yumeen, MD, is a freshman resident of internal medicine at Hartford Healthcare St. Vincent’s Medical Center in Connecticut and a contributor to the ABC News Medical Unit.