The HIV vaccine could be ready by 2021 or 2022

PARIS (AFP) –

Researchers announced Saturday that they have tested an experimental vaccine against HIV, which has caused an immune response in humans and has protected some monkeys from infection, a news deemed encouraging.

This vaccine, which is safe for humans, is sufficiently advanced to be tested in 2,600 women in southern Africa.

"These results represent an important step" towards the creation of a vaccine, said virologist director Dan Barouch. , in a statement in the magazine The Lancet .

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However, he warned that there is no guarantee that the next tests will be positive "We must be cautious", he said.

Two-thirds of Rhesus macaques undergoing treatment were protected by the vaccine in laboratory tests.

The results of larger tests are expected in 2021 or 2022.

This is the "fifth concept vaccine" against HIV tested in 35 years, according to Barouch.

Another, called RV144, showed that he was protecting the HIV man to some extent. In 2009, a study showed that the risk of infection was reduced by 31.2% among 16,000 volunteers in Thailand

The study published Saturday was conducted among 393 healthy, seronegative adults , aged between 18 and 50 in Africa. East Africa, South Africa, Thailand and the United States. Some of them received a placebo

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Tests showed the safety of the vaccine combination, including different types of HIV virus, only five participants with side effects such as diarrhea or vertigo.

These same vaccines protected two-thirds of the 72 macaques treated by researchers after inoculation of the virus

"We need a vaccine," says Francois Venter. University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. But "we already know: promising experimental vaccines that do not materialize."

"This is certainly not the definitive vaccine, but it can be a phenomenal advance," says Jean-Daniel Lelièvre of Vaccine Research Institute. "At best", these investigations will produce a vaccine that can be administered in "almost 10 years".

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Some 37 million people live According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 1.8 million people contract the virus each year. The disease has killed about 35 million of the 80 million that it has infected since its first diagnosis in the 1980s.

Despite advances in medicine in the prevention and treatment of the disease, (PrEP, antiretrovirals , triterapias), the researchers insist on the measures to be taken to avoid the infection: protection during sex, use of new syringes, sterilization of medical supplies, etc.