What, Moderna announced last week that it has begun dosing its first participants in Phase I clinical trials for an HIV vaccine that uses the same mRNA technology as the company’s COVID-19 vaccine.
The company, which is conducting the trial in partnership with the nonprofit International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAV I), hopes the trial will confirm whether the vaccine can deliver HIV-specific antigens to the body and induce an immune response.
Researchers will study 56 HIV-negative adults for six months. Forty-eight of the volunteers will receive at least one dose of the primary vaccine, 32 of whom will also receive the booster. The remaining eight will receive the booster vaccine alone. The first participants were just vaccinated at George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences in Washington,
With mRNA-based vaccines, such as the one being tested, mRNA strands enter human cells and take our immune systems on a test run. This gives immune cells a heads-up for what they can expect if they encounter a virus. This process works incredibly well against SARS-CoV-2, and so there’s hope that it may be protective against HIV as well.
“We are tremendously excited to be advancing this new direction in HIV vaccine design with Moderna’s mRNA platform,” Mark Feinberg, president and CEO of IAV I, said in a statement. “The search for an HIV vaccine has been long and challenging, and having new tools in terms of immunogens and platforms could be the key to making rapid progress toward an urgently needed, effective HIV vaccine.”
Researchers have long sought a vaccine to protect against HIV. Various medications and treatments mean that HIV prognosis is often manageable, and no longer the death sentence it once was—but HIV is notoriously difficult to vaccinate against.
The virus integrates itself into the human genome within 72 hours of transmission, producing an irreversible infection. Many previous attempts to create a vaccine have made it to the clinical trial phase, but later failed as they didn’t generate high enough protective antibodies at a fast enough rate to completely prevent infection.
The second time ever, someone was spontaneously cured of HIV
A second person with HIV seems to have cleared the infection without stem cell treatments, raising optimism for efforts to develop a cure or vaccine. Researchers could find no evidence of intact virus in the patient, a 30-year-old woman from Esperanza, Argentina, who’d been diagnosed eight years prior.
“Examples of such a cure that develops naturally suggest that current efforts to find a cure for HIV infection are not elusive, and that the prospects of getting to an ‘AIDS-free generation’ may ultimately be successful,” X U, XY, of the Rayon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT, and Harvard, told CNN in an email.
XY, and her colleagues, reported the findings on November 15 in Annals of Internal Medicine. The team previously described the first-known person—a 67-year-old woman named Loren Wallenberg—to naturally achieve this so-called sterilizing cure last year in the journal Nature. Additionally, two other cases of a sterilizing cure have been reported in people with HIV who received bone marrow transplants (also known as stem cell transplants).
About 38 million people are currently living with HIV, which is untreated, causes AIDS. During infection, HIV inserts copies of its genetic material, known as Pro viruses, into the DNA of the host’s own cells. This creates a viral reservoir that allows HIV to hide from the immune system.
Antiretroviral therapy can prevent the virus from replicating, thereby reducing the amount of HIV in the blood, or viral load, to undetectable levels. However, it doesn’t get rid of the viral reservoir.
XY, and her team, have spent years studying a group of people called elite controllers, who maintain viral reservoirs but can keep the infection under control without antiretroviral drugs. Some individuals are also able to suppress the virus after they stop treatment. In the incredibly rare instances of a sterilizing cure, though, the person has apparently eradicated the viral reservoir, whether through stem cell transplants or their natural immune response.
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