HIV vaccine and prevention research showing promise

In the 1980s, people died of HIV/AIDS and they died quickly.

But during the course of its 35-year long epidemic, treatments have made stunning strides in life expectancy and many of the 70 million people worldwide infected with HIV/AIDS can expect to live a relatively normal lifespan.

Still, there’s no definitive cure.

Creating a vaccine for HIV is difficult because there are many different strains of it throughout the world, even more than the flu, and it has a protein covering that makes it resistant to many types of antibodies that could be used to attack it.

One candidate, a new ‘mosaic’ vaccine, with research published by The Lancet, targets many different HIV strains and created a robust immune response. This encouraging result has led to the second phase of the APPROACH clinical trial which will administer the vaccine to 2,600 at-risk women in southern African countries where one out of every 25 adults is currently living with HIV, the highest in the world.

A second candidate, powered by separate research from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, ignores the broad approach to hitting multiple strains and instead targets a specific vulnerability in HIV itself. In testing, the vaccine was able to neutralize a large portion of the most common HIV strains, and human clinical trials are planned for 2019.

In any case, incremental progress is being made in learning how HIV/AIDS attacks the human body and all of the research and experiments used to find ways to prevent it are also providing critical knowledge in the fight against other infectious diseases and viruses, such as influenza, that brings benefits to healthcare at large.