AIDS vaccine on horizon
Catalan clinical trial controls HIV virus in five people without anti-retroviral therapy for first time; study presented at global conference in Seattle
HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, is very difficult to destroy. It becomes integrated within the infected person's DNA and can remain dormant for years. Treatments using a combination of anti-retrovirals may lead to the virus disappearing from the blood, but some viral reserves always remain in a lethargic state inside the cells, and when the treatment is stopped they emerge and the person becomes infected again.
Researchers around the world have spent years trying to find a therapeutic vaccine capable of curing the disease permanently. Yet in all the clinical trials that have been conducted to date, when a person stops taking retroviral treatment, the virus has bounced back within a maximum of four weeks. Yesterday, however, a Catalan team published the first results of a new clinical trial, led by IrsiCaixa and the Catalan Fighting AIDS Foundation, which according to Bonaventura Clotet, head of the two institutions, “demonstrates on a clinical level that there is a vaccine that has some degree of efficacy.”
The preliminary results of the trial, presented by its coordinator Dr. Beatriz Mothe and Dr. José Moltó at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) held in Seattle, demonstrate for the first time that the combination of a vaccine developed at Oxford University and another drug, Romidepsina - until now used to treat certain types of cancer - can effectively re-educate the immune system so that the patient can bring the virus under control without further treatment when applied to patients who have started treatment very early (during the first six months after infection).