A vaccine created from various HIV strains, called the "mosaic" vaccine, shows potential to protect people against the many types of virus that cause AIDS.
The vaccine improved the immune responses against HIV during a clinical trial involving nearly 40 healthy adults. With this positive result, the experts involved in the experiment are now moving to the next phase of human trials involving 2,600 women in southern Africa who are at risk of contracting HIV.
The mixture of HIV strains in the "mosaic" vaccine is delivered using a nonreplicating common-cold virus. To date, the "mosaic" is one among the only five experimental HIV vaccines that have proceeded to efficacy human trials.
HIV/AIDS has been a global epidemic for 35 years now.
Promising Trials On Healthy Individuals
For the experiment, the researchers recruited 393 healthy adults aged 18 to 50 years old from 12 clinics in East Africa, South Africa, Thailand, and the United States. "Healthy" means that they were not infected by HIV. These participants were divided into two groups: first, those who were injected one of seven vaccine combinations or a placebo, and second, those who were injected with four vaccinations over the course of 48 weeks. The volunteers were also injected with the common-cold virus to boost their immune system once at the start of the trial and again 12 weeks later into the study.
The result of the study, published in The Lancet on July 6, showed that "mosaic" vaccine was able to trigger anti-HIV immune responses in healthy individuals. At this level, the vaccine proved to be capable of protecting the participants from the deadly virus.
Some of the volunteers reported some side effects but the researchers said they were tolerable. Five participants experienced one of the following: diarrhea, postural dizziness, and back pain.
At this point, however, the researchers clarified that the positive results were not guaranteed yet that an HIV treatment is at hand.
"The challenges in the development of an HIV vaccine are unprecedented, and the ability to induce HIV-specific immune responses does not necessarily indicate that a vaccine will protect humans from HIV infection," said Dan Barouch, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and lead researcher of the study.
People With AIDS
As of June 2018, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said there were an estimated 38,500 new HIV infections in 2015 in the United States. At the end of 2015, there were an estimated 1,122,900 adults and adolescents who were living with HIV. Among people aged 13 to 24 with HIV, an estimated 51 percent were not aware that they have the disease.
Meanwhile, the World Health Organization and UNAIDS estimated that there were about 36.7 million people who were living with HIV worldwide at the end of 2016. In that same year, some 1.8 million people were newly infected while 1 million had already died because of HIV-related complications.
