Although they have proven successful, the trials are still in their infancy.
After more than 30 years of testing, there may be a promising breakthrough in the search for a vaccine for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS if left untreated.
Now, preliminary data from an early-stage clinical trial of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative and the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, suggest that a new HIV vaccine may be promising.
“These are very early studies. But they are still challenging,” 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.
Although the vaccine candidate will still need to be tested in larger studies, experts hope that this vaccine will succeed where others have failed.
“This is a very innovative approach to developing a vaccine that has not been done before,” said Schaffner, who described the vaccine’s core technology as “a kind of culmination of 21st century science.”
When HIV was first discovered to be the cause of AIDS in the early 1980s, researchers believed that a vaccine for the virus could be created quickly, as it had been done for diseases such as measles, chickenpox and hepatitis B. In fact, the secretary The then American health and human services officer, Margaret Heckler, predicted in 1984 that a vaccine would be available in two years. Researchers soon discovered that there were more obstacles than they initially thought.
HIV is a rapidly moving virus, creating a moving target for vaccines. HIV also has many different subtypes, so a vaccine that provides protection against one subtype of HIV may be ineffective against another.
New research from IAVI and Scripps aims to address these difficulties by developing a vaccine that helps the body create “generally neutralizing antibodies.” Researchers hope to boost a person’s immune system against many variants and mutations of HIV.
This research is based on “identifying a subgroup of HIV-infected individuals … who, during their infection, produce so-called broadly neutralizing antibodies, which practically means that these antibodies can strongly block infection with various HIV variants, and this is the key goal, “said Dr. Mark Feinberg, Ph.D., CEO of IAVI.
In the initial phase, the Phase 1 clinical trial, which is still ongoing, involved 48 healthy adults who received a total of two doses of either vaccine or placebo two months apart. Preliminary data showed that 97% of those who received the vaccine had early evidence that their immune systems could produce these broad antibodies.
“The generally neutralizing antibody is important because the virus can move so fast that they need something that is a rifle, not a rifle … to prevent a whole 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 COVID-19 vaccines, “where science was prepared and we were able to develop vaccines, plural, very, very quickly,” Schaffner added.
Researchers at IAVI and Scripps are working with companies such as Moderna to leverage mRNA technology used in the development of COVID-19 vaccines.
Sara Yumeen, MD, is an internal medicine resident at Hartford Healthcare St. Vincent of Connecticut and contributes to the ABC News Medical Unit.