New HIV vaccine shows promise in early stage clinical trial

The International AIDS Vaccine Initiative or IAVI and California’s Scripps Research Institute have come up with a new HIV vaccine which showed promising results in early stage clinical trials.

The vaccine helps the body create ‘broadly neutralising antibodies’, ABC News reported on Wednesday.

The researchers hope to stimulate a person's immune system against many HIV variants and mutations, it added.

Based on the preliminary data from the trial, Dr William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine and infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, said, "These are very early studies. But nonetheless, they are provocative."

The HIV mutates rapidly to create a moving target for vaccines. The virus also has different subtypes, so, a vaccine effective against one subtype may not work against another.

"The broadly neutralising antibody is important, because the virus can mutate so rapidly that they need something that's a shotgun, not a rifle ... to prevent a whole variety of different kinds of HIV configurations," said Schaffner.

“This research is based on ‘identification of a subset of HIV-infected individuals ... who, in the course of their infection, do make so-called broadly neutralising antibodies, which basically means these antibodies are able to potently block infection of diverse HIV variants, and that is the key goal,” Dr Mark Feinberg, the CEO of IAVI, told ABC News.

The trial, which is still underway, involved 48 healthy adults who received a total of two doses of either the vaccine or placebo, two months apart.

Preliminary data showed 97 percent of those who received the vaccine had early evidence that their immune system may be able to make these broad antibodies, according to the report.

Following the discovery of HIV as the cause for AIDS in the early 1980s, researchers had hoped to formulate a vaccine swiftly mirroring the cases for diseases like, measles, chickenpox and hepatitis B.

However, it was soon clear that there were more hurdles than they had initially thought.

The decadeslong search for an HIV vaccine lies in stark contrast to the development of vaccines for COVID-19, "where the science was ready, and we were able to develop vaccines, plural, very, very quickly," Schaffner said.

The researchers at IAVI and Scripps are collaborating with companies, like Moderna, to harness the mRNA technology used in the development of vaccines against COVID-19, ABC News reported.

While the candidate HIV vaccine being studied in this trial is not mRNA based, the researchers are looking at how mRNA technology may be used in the future to further development of an HIV vaccine.