Encouraging progress towards an HIV vaccine



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"These results represent a milestone," study director Virologist Dan Barouch said in a statement from The Lancet. His team of researchers reported on Saturday an encouraging progress, with an experimental HIV vaccine that elicited an immune response in humans and protected macaques from infection.

The development of this vaccine potential, safe for man, is now advanced enough to run a test on 2,600 women in southern Africa

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"We must remain cautious"

Joined by other experts, Dan Barouch warned, however, that there was no guarantee that the following tests would be so positive. "We must remain cautious."

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.

"This will be only the fifth concept of HIV vaccine whose effectiveness will be tested in 35 years and a few of history of the epidemic, "said Professor Barouch.

Another, called RV144, showed that he protected man from HIV in a certain measured. In 2009, a study indicated that it had reduced the risk of infection by 16,000 in 16,000 volunteers in Thailand.

The study published Saturday reports the results of a test in 393 healthy adults, seronegative , aged 18 to 50 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 virus HIV made sufficiently harmless, with the hope to provoke an immune response. But this one was "robust", praised the Pr Barouche.

Phenomenal advance?

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 subsequently attempted to inoculate the virus.

Other specialists interviewed by AFP 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 experienced this, promising experimental vaccines that have not materialized."

For the French Jean-Daniel Lelièvre, Vaccine Research Institute (National Agency for AIDS Research): "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 administrable in "almost 10 years".

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Some 37 million people live with the 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 diagnosed for the first time 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 …

With Agencies [19659025] L'Observateur ” clbad=”img-profil”/>

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