Although they were successful, the trials are still in the very early stages.
After more than 30 years of efforts, there may be promising advances in the search for a vaccine for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS if left untreated.
Preliminary data from an early clinical trial from the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative and The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, suggest that a new HIV vaccine may hold promise.
“These are very early studies. But still it is challenging,” said Dr. Said William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine and infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, who was not involved in the clinical trial.
Although the vaccination candidate still needs to be tested in larger studies, experts are hopeful that the vaccine may succeed if others do not.
“This is a very innovative approach to the development of a vaccine that has not been done before,” Schaffner said.
When HIV was first discovered as a cause of AIDS in the early 1980s, researchers thought that a vaccine for this virus could be created quickly, as was done for diseases such as measles, chickenpox and hepatitis B. In fact, the then U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, Margaret Heckler, predicted in 1984 that a vaccine would be available in two years. Researchers soon realized that there were more obstacles than they initially thought.
HIV is a virus that mutates rapidly, creating a moving target for vaccines. HIV also has many different subtypes, so a vaccine that is protected 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 neutralize antibodies in general. The researchers hope to stimulate a person’s immune system against many HIV variants and mutations.
This research is based on the identification of a subset of HIV-infected individuals … which, in the course of their infection, produce so-called broad-neutralizing antibodies, which basically means that these antibodies are able to strongly block infection of various HIVs. variants, and that is the main goal, “said Dr. Mark Feinberg, Ph.D., CEO of IAVI.
In their early phase, Phase 1 clinical trial, which is still ongoing, 48 healthy adults were involved 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 system could possibly make these broad antibodies.
“The broad-spectrum neutralizing antibody is important because the virus can mutate so rapidly that they need something that is a gun, not a gun … to prevent a variety of different types of HIV configurations,” Schaffner said.
The decades-long search for an HIV vaccine is in stark contrast to the development of vaccines for COVID-19, ‘where science was ready and we were able to develop vaccines very, very quickly,’ Schaffner added.
The researchers at IAVI and Scripps are working with companies, such as Moderna, to leverage the mRNA technology used to develop COVID-19 vaccines.
Sara Yumeen, MD, is a provisional resident for internal medicine at Hartford Healthcare St. Vincent’s Medical Center in Connecticut and is a contributor to the ABC News Medical Unit.