Scientists say HIV therapeutic vaccine can temporarily improve the immune system
Scientists in Spain say they are impressed with the results of a therapeutic vaccine that can temporarily enable the immune system to deal more effectively with the HIV virus in infected patients.
AFP reported the vaccine, based on immune cells exposed to HIV that had been inactivated with heat, was tested on a group of 36 people carrying the virus and the results were the best yet recorded for such a treatment, the team said.
Felipe Garcia, one of the scientists in the team at Barcelona University’s Hospital Clinic said:
“What we did was give instructions to the immune system so it could learn to destroy the virus, which it does not do naturally.”
The vaccine, a shot that treats an existing disease rather than preventing it, was safe and led to a dramatic drop in the amount of HIV virus detected in some patients, said the study – published on Wednesday in Science Translation Medicine.
After 12 weeks of the trial, the HIV viral load dropped by more than 90% among 12 of the 22 patients who received the vaccine.
Only one among the 11 patients who received a control injection without the vaccine experienced a similar result.
After 24 weeks, the effectiveness of the vaccine had begun to decline, however, with seven of the 20 remaining patients receiving it enjoying a similar 90% slump in viral load.
No-one in the control group of 10 patients experienced such a decline in the virus.
The vaccine lost its effectiveness after a year, when the patients had to return to their regular combination therapy of anti-retroviral drugs.
“This investigation opens the path to additional studies with the final goal of achieving a functional cure — the control of HIV replication for long periods or an entire life without anti-retroviral treatment,” the researchers said in a statement.
“Although we still have not got a functional cure, the results published today open the possibility of achieving an optimal therapeutic vaccine, or a combination of strategies that includes a therapeutic vaccine, and could help to reach that goal,” they added.
The team will now continue its work and focus on improving the vaccine and combining it with other therapeutic vaccines over the next three or four years.
