The world has long hoped for a vaccine that would help people with AIDS. We’ve not made much progress in the past, but that may soon be changing. Julie Steenhuysen writes about a vaccine that appeared to make people more vulnerable to infection, not less, and other attempts that dashed hopes, as well.
But if you’re talking about preventing people from getting the disease, the news there is very good. The FDA approved this week a drug, Truvada, that has been shown to protect people from being infected in the first place.
A 2009 clinical trial in Thailand was the first to show it was possible to prevent HIV infection in humans, according to Steenhuysen.
"We know the face of the enemy," Dr. Barton Haynes, of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and recent director of the Center for HIV AIDS Vaccine Immunology (CHAVI) told her.
Steenhuysen notes that, unlike many viruses that cause infectious disease, HIV is constantly changing, continuously putting out slightly different versions of itself, with different strains affecting different populations around the world, making it almost impossible to find a way to end it once and for all.
Antiretroviral drugs may reduce the risk of infected people passing on the virus, and may also prevent healthy people from becoming infected through sex with HIV-positive partners. There are now 26 antiretroviral drugs on the market, and more in the pipeline for treating people with HIV, which has infected 60 million people and already killed 25 million since the epidemic first emerged, according to a story by Kerry Sheridan.
A combination of two vaccines has suddenly brought the possibility that we may just have come up with something that could one day stop this deadly virus in its tracks.
Both vaccines initially had poor showings in individual trials, according to Steenhuysen, but results of the study published in 2009 showed the vaccine combination cut HIV infections by 31.2 percent, not big enough to be considered effective, according to Steenhuysen and the experts she talked to. Regardless, it started the ball rolling, she quotes Wayne Koff, chief scientific officer of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) based in New York.
A vaccine tested in March in Atlanta brought the exciting news that it protected some “nonhuman primates” from the virus. Other researchers found a vaccine that protected monkeys from the virus earlier this year. And we’re not alone in the world trying to end this deadly scourge. Canadian researchers tested a vaccine in 2011, according to the Toronto Sun.
A new trial will start soon which will use a Sanofi vaccine, but instead of using the other vaccine, AIDSVAX, researchers will use a different vaccine candidate with a boosting agent from Novartis, Steenhuysen reports.
Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO West 2012, taking place Oct. 2-5, in Austin, TX. ITEXPO offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. For more information on registering for ITEXPO click here.
Stay in touch with everything happening at ITEXPO. Follow us on Twitter.
Edited by
Allison Boccamazzo
