A team of Spanish researchers say they have developed a therapeutic vaccine that can temporarily brake growth of the HIV virus in infected patients.
The vaccine, based on immune cells exposed to HIV that are inactivated with heat, was tested on a group of 36 people carrying the virus and the results were the best yet recorded for such a treatment, the team said.
“What we did was give instructions to the immune system so it could learn to destroy the virus, which it does not do naturally,” said Felipe Garcia, one of the scientists in the team at Barcelona University’s Hospital Clinic.
The therapeutic vaccine, a shot that treats an existing disease rather than preventing it, was safe and led to a dramatic drop in the amount of HIV virus detected in some patients, said the study, published Wednesday in Science Translation Medicine.
After 12 weeks of the trial, the HIV viral load dropped by more than 90 per cent among 12 of the 22 patients who received the vaccine.
Only one among the 11 patients who received a control injection without the vaccine experienced a similar result in the drug trials. After 24 weeks, the effectiveness had begun to decline, and it lost its effectiveness after a year, when the patients had to return to their regular combination therapy of anti-retroviral drugs.
— AFP