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Researchers reported on Saturday encouraging progress in finding an HIV vaccine, with an experimental vaccine that provoked an immune response in humans and protected macaques from infection. The development of this vaccine potential, safe for humans, is now advanced enough to launch a test on 2,600 women in Southern Africa. "These results represent a milestone," study director Virologist Dan Barouch said in a statement from The Lancet. Joined by other experts, he warned, however, that there was no guarantee that the following tests would be so positive. "We have to be cautious," he told AFP
Two-thirds of rhesus macaques were protected by the vaccine in laboratory tests. The results of the life-size test, called Imbokodo (rock, in Zulu), are expected in 2021 or 2022. "It will be only the fifth concept of vaccine against HIV whose effectiveness will be tested in the 35 years and some history of the epidemic, "Barouch said,
Another, called RV144, showed that he was protecting man from HIV to a certain extent. In 2009, a study indicated that it had reduced the risk of infection by 16.2% in 16,000 volunteers in Thailand.
The study published this Saturday reports the results of a test in 393 healthy adults, Seronegative, aged 18 to 50 years in East Africa, South Africa, Thailand and the United States
Some received one of the possible vaccine combinations or a placebo, via four injections in 48 weeks. These combinations were made of different types of HIV viruses, rendered sufficiently harmless, with the hope of provoking an immune response. But this one was "robust", welcomed the professor Barouch.
The tests showed the harmlessness. Only five participants reported adverse effects, such as abdominal pain, diarrhea, dizziness or back pain. In a separate study, these same vaccines offered protection to two-thirds of the 72 macaques to which the researchers then attempted to inoculate the virus. Other specialists interviewed by AFP have welcomed this progress.
"I can not repeat enough how much we need a vaccine," said François Venter of the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa ). But "we have already known that, promising experimental vaccines that have not materialized." For Frenchman Jean-Daniel Lelièvre, from the Vaccine Research Institute: "This is probably not the definitive vaccine, but it can be a phenomenal breakthrough." According to him, "in the best case", this research will produce a vaccine that can be administered in "almost 10 years."
37 million people are living with HIV or AIDS, according to the World Health Organization and 1.8 million cases are contracted each year. The disease has killed some 35 million of the 80 million people it has infected since it was first diagnosed in the early 1980s. Despite advances in medicine in the prevention and treatment of the disease ( PrEP, antiretrovirals, tritherapies), the researchers insist on measures to not be infected: protection during bad, use of new syringes, sterilization of medical equipment …
