Scientists Take Encouraging Step Towards AIDS Vaccine

Paris .- An Announcement Made In The Lancet Magazine Strengthens The Hope Of Mastering AIDS Disease, This Because A Group Of Researchers Announced To Have Tested An Experimental Vaccine Against The Virus of human immunodeficiency (HIV), a precursor of pathology.

Tests of 393 healthy, seronegative adults aged 18-50 in East Africa, South Africa, Thailand, and the United States provoked an immune response between humans and some monkeys. infection
"These results represent an important step" towards the creation of a vaccine, said study director, virologist Dan Barouch, in a statement, AFP said.

The development of this potent and safe vaccine for men is advanced enough to be tested in 2,600 women in southern Africa. Two-thirds of the rhesus macaques who received treatment were protected by the vaccine in laboratory tests.

However, Barouch warned that there is no guarantee that the following tests will be positive. "We have to be careful," he said in that regard.

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

This is the "fifth concept vaccine" against HIV tested in 35 years, recalled the virologist .
Another, called RV144, showed that he was protecting the HIV man to a certain extent. In 2009, one study indicated that the risk of infection was reduced by 31.2% among 16,000 volunteers in Thailand.

The Survey

The study tests, published last Saturday, showed the safety of the vaccine combination, which included different types of HIV virus, with only five participants with side effects such as diarrhea or dizziness.
These same vaccines protected two-thirds of the 72 macaques that the researchers tried after the virus was inoculated.

Some specialists interviewed by AFP welcome this progress.
"We are so in need of a vaccine," said Francois Venter of the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa). But "we have already known: promising experimental vaccines that do not materialize".

"This is surely not the definitive vaccine, but it can be a phenomenal breakthrough," said French Jean-Daniel Lelièvre of the Vaccine Research Institute. "In the best case," these investigations will produce a manageable vaccine in "almost 10 years".

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), some 37 million people are living with HIV or AIDS and 1.8 million people contract the disease each year. The disease 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 control of treatment of the disease (PrEP, antiretrovirals, triterapies), the researchers insist on the measures to be taken to avoid infection: protection during sex, use of new syringes, sterilization of medical equipment, etc.