Researchers from Oregon Health & Science University have created an HIV/AIDS vaccine candidate that is capable of completely clearing all AIDS causing viruses from the body.
Statistics claim that over one million Americans living in the United States have HIV/AIDS and approximately 20 percent of them are not aware of their infection. In 2010, the infection caused around 16,000 deaths in the country. In order to tackle this epidemic, researchers from Oregon Health & Science University have created an HIV/AIDS vaccine candidate that is capable of completely clearing all AIDS causing viruses from the body.
The vaccine candidate is being tested through simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), a non-human form of HIV that causes AIDS in monkeys. Further research and testing will hopefully make it safe to be used on humans.
"To date, HIV infection has only been cured in a very small number of highly-publicized but unusual clinical cases in which HIV-infected individuals were treated with anti-viral medicines very early after the onset of infection or received a stem cell transplant to combat cancer," said Louis Picker, M.D., associate director of the OHSU Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute, in a press release. "This latest research suggests that certain immune responses elicited by a new vaccine may also have the ability to completely remove HIV from the body."
The new vaccine candidate has been formed by combining SIV with cytomegalovirus (CMV), a common virus carried by a large percent of global population. Researchers found that a modified version of CMV maintains "effector memory" T-cells that are capable of searching out and destroying SIV-infected cells.
For the study, approximately 50 percent of the study monkeys were given highly pathogenic SIV after they were vaccinated with the new vaccine candidate. These monkeys first become infected with SIV but as time went by, all traces of SIV was eliminated from the body.
"Through this method we were able to teach the monkey's body to better 'prepare its defenses' to combat the disease," the authors concluded. "Our vaccine mobilized a T-cell response that was able to overtake the SIV invaders in 50 percent of the cases treated. Moreover, in those cases with a positive response, our testing suggests SIV was banished from the host. We are hopeful that pairing our modified CMV vector with HIV will lead to a similar result in humans.
