UNC receives $5.6 million from NIH to test therapeutic HIV vaccine stat : News Medical

"The next step would be a combination study investigating a latency-reversing agent and the vaccine," Goonetilleke said. A multidisciplinary research team at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has been awarded more than $5.6 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to test a therapeutic vaccine in people living with HIV. The study will recruit patients at UNC who are living with HIV, but who are virally suppressed due to antiretroviral therapy. "Here we will test the second generation of this vaccine that we hope will be even better at targeting HIV reservoirs in the body." "The first generation of this vaccine produced an impressive immune response in people living with HIV," said Nilu Goonetilleke, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Departments of Medicine, Microbiology and Immunology at UNC.




The other HIV Vaccine in human testing, the HVTN 702 candidate, is a newer version of the only other HIV vaccine to show any efficacy in humans, called RV144. (The other is the HVTN 702 HIV vaccine candidate, now underway in Thailand.) The mosaic approach seems promising in very early clinical researchIn the 35 years of the HIV epidemic, only four HIV vaccine concepts have been tested in humans. "A safe and effective HIV vaccine would be a powerful tool to reduce new HIV infections worldwide and help bring about a durable end to the HIV/AIDS pandemic," Fauci said in a statement. "One of the great challenges for development of HIV vaccine is viral diversity," said Dan Barouch, a lead researcher on the vaccine and director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

Johnson and Johnson (JNJ) developed an HIV vaccine that may protect against multiple strains at once — Quartz

These volunteers were given one of the seven mosaic HIV vaccines or a placebo to see if they had any adverse side effects. Notably, there are plans for a larger clinical trial involving 2,600 women in southern Africa beginning in December 2017 or early 2018. "HIV is distinctly unique in that the body doesn't make a good immune response against it," he says. As Vox reports, this is the fifth time an HIV vaccine has reached clinical trials in humans. The type and strength of this immune response varied depending on which version of the vaccine each person received.


collected by :Lucy William

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