A Fast Track to Preventive and Therapeutic HIV Vaccines

The number of new HIV infections remains unacceptably high, and urgent new approaches are needed to advance HIV vaccine science. However, developing a preventive HIV vaccine has proven to be an intractable scientific challenge, wrote Prof Alexandra Trkola, PhD, and Prof Penny L Moore, PhD, in an article published by The Lancet Infectious Diseases.

This view was published on October 23, 2023, and stated, 'Recent advances in HIV immunogen design have taken the field closer to triggering the rare precursors of broadly neutralizing antibodies, which are widely assumed to be necessary for a vaccine.

Nonetheless, these same studies and previous studies in people living with HIV have also highlighted the significant hurdles that must be overcome to boost the cross-reactivity and potency of these responses to sufficient levels.

Here, we describe an opportunity for fast-tracking the evaluation of candidate preventive and therapeutic vaccines by immunizing people with HIV who are antiretroviral therapy suppressed.

We argue that such studies, unlike traditional studies of vaccines in participants not infected with HIV, will be faster and more informative and will allow the vaccine field to bypass multiple hurdles.

This approach will accelerate the process of defining the capacity of immunogens to trigger relevant antibodies, currently an extremely slow and expensive pathway, and provide a quick path to creating an HIV vaccine.'

The full, unedited article is posted at this link.

Following the discovery of HIV as a causative agent of AIDS, multiple HIV vaccine clinical trials have been conducted globally over the past 35 years. As of October 24, 2923, there are several HIV vaccine candidates conducting research. 

According to the U.S. National Institutes of Health, HIV vaccine candidates can not cause an HIV infection.