HIV Effective Vaccine: 5 HIV-Positive Patients Became Virus-Free For 7 Months Without Taking Antiretroviral Drugs
Researchers in Spain developed a treatment that enables HIV-positive patients to end antiretroviral (ARV) drugs' regular intake. Five HIV patients were freed from the virus for seven months after being injected with the new vaccine.
This is the initial phase close to success since finding a vaccine in the last 30 years didn't triumph, Mail Online reported. “It's the proof of concept that through therapeutic vaccination, we can really re-educate our T cells to control the virus,” Dr. Beatriz Mothe, from the IrsiCaixa AIDS Research Institute in Barcelona, Spain said.
The search for an AIDS vaccine spent big investments and in-depth efforts but even one vaccine didn't arrive in the market. Researchers eventually decided to experiment on therapeutic vaccines, and this is the first study that scientists perceived to be possible in humans.
Their aim is to suppress the virus for months or even years without the daily intake of ARV drugs. Dr. Mothe and her colleagues utilized an HIV vaccine created by Professor Tomáš Hanke from the University of Oxford in the UK.
The study involved 13 participants who took ARVs of an average of more than three years. They are all within six months of being infected with HIV.
The participants were injected with three sets of vaccine shot, and they stopped taking ARV drugs. After four weeks, the virus return was seen in the eight of them.
However, the other five became virus-free for six to 28 weeks without restarting the medication. The virus turned to being transiently undetectable, and it never exceeds 2,000 copies per milliliter, which is the gauge to restart treatment.
According to IFLScience, while the five participants stopped taking ART drugs, their own immune system inhibited the HIV from reproducing. One of them didn't take the ARV drugs for the entire seven months.
Consequently, researchers called temporarily the vaccine as a “functional cure," at least for some. The study included a small number of participants hence the treatment's evidence of theory is significant.