HIV data remains terrible several decades after its first case. It is estimated that 40 million people are living with HIV worldwide. Two thirds of this group on the African continent. In 2022, more than 600,000 people died from HIV-related causes and more than 1.3 million were infected.
However, this is expected to change in a few years. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has subsidized a project that aims to develop the first vaccine to prevent HIV. This would be an unparalleled achievement, since “until now, no one has achieved it,” he stated. Roger Sanders, project director and professor of Virology at the University Medical Center Amsterdam. The subsidy is 4.5 million euros for the next five years.
UNTIL NOBODY HAS ACHIEVED IT
Hundreds of thousands of researchers around the world they have searched for the cure for this disease. However, “all the vaccines that failed have not been able to induce neutralizing antibodies, much less neutralizing antibodies in general terms,” says Sanders.
Despite the previous difficulties When it comes to developing a pharmaceutical product that permanently prevents this infection, “there is a lot of optimism” due to recent advances. “There are plenty positive results in several phase I studies on the attempt to induce broadly neutralizing antibodies,” explains the project director.
“There are quite a few positive results in several phase I studies on the attempt to induce broadly neutralizing antibodies”
Likewise, Professor Sanders’ team plans to use a procedure called ‘Germline Targeting‘. This consists of guiding the immune system by activating immune cells capable of growing and produce antibodies that fight this infection, neutralizing the virus. Expectations for this future treatment are high, because it has been shown in recent studies that it works.
Through this procedure, an immune response can be developed, which strong enough enough to repel an HIV infection and, therefore, to a fully functional vaccine. However, the way is long and there are many things to take into account.
“There are several reasons why It is so difficult make a vaccine and one of them is the diversity of the virus. A second difficulty lies in structural properties of the protein surrounding the virus, which is crucial for vaccines,” says Professor Sanders.
2024-01-15 10:25:00
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