Scientists Take Encouraging Steps Toward an HIV Vaccine

The researchers announced Saturday that they had tested an experimental vaccine against HIV, which caused an immune response in humans and protected some monkeys from infection, a new one that is considered encouraging.

"These results represent an important step" toward creating a vaccine, said study director, virologist Dan Barouch, in a statement in the review. The Lancet

However, he warned that there is no guarantee that the following tests will be positive. "We must be careful," he told AFP

Two-thirds of the Rhesus macaques who underwent treatment were protected by the vaccine in laboratory tests

. 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% in 16,000 volunteers in Thailand

. The study published on Saturday looked at 393 healthy, seronegative, elderly adults 18 to 50 years old. East Africa, South Africa, Thailand and the United States. Some of them received a placebo

Tests showed the safety of the vaccine combination, which included different types of HIV virus, with only five participants having side effects such as diarrhea or dizziness.

These same vaccines protected two-thirds of them. the 72 macaques that the researchers tried after the inoculation of the virus

Some specialists interviewed by AFP welcomed this progress.

"We are in need of a vaccine," says François Venter of the University of the Witwatersrand. 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," says Jean-Daniel Lelièvre of the Vaccine Research Institute. "At best", this research will produce a vaccine that can be administered in "almost ten years".

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), some 37 million people are living with HIV or AIDS. 1.8 million people contract it 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 that must be taken to avoid infection: protection during sex, use of new syringes, sterilization of medical equipment, etc.