The HIV virus has kept the pharmaceutical industry busy for a long time. In the forty years since the outbreak of the HIV epidemic, not one pharmaceutical company has developed a working vaccine. The messenger RNA technique (mRNA for short) may be able to change this. Moderna is now the first company to use this new form of vaccines for the HIV virus, following a successful corona vaccine using the same technology.
Moderna will test two versions of the vaccine, mRNA-1644 and mRNA-1644v2, on subjects. A total of 56 HIV-negative people will be examined to see whether they are producing the right antibodies. This is according to the registry of the American health institute NIH. Moderna itself has not yet released anything about the tests.
According to medical platform Verywell Health the vaccine will be more resistant to various mutations of the HIV virus. Numerous different variants of the virus are currently known. “Thanks to mRNA, it only takes an update in the coding of the vaccine,” Rajesh Gandhi, head of the HIV Medicine Association, told the platform.
Should the vaccine prove effective, which could take years, Moderna will be the first company to market a working HIV vaccine, more than 40 years after the outbreak of the epidemic that hit the LGBT+ community hard. Previous tests using other vaccine methods have all failed. Thanks to the success story of the mRNA technique, Moderna hopes to develop a vaccine for the flu in addition to an HIV vaccine.
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