A vaccine targeting multiple strains of HIV is going into late-stage testing phase in the United States and Europe later this year.
Pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson is getting ready to test a new type of vaccine against HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, hoping to end the epidemic that has killed around 35.4 million people since its first reported deadly case in 1981.
The groundbreaking study will involve approximately 3,800 gay and bisexual men, who will receive six shots over four sessions, Anthony Fauci, the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told Bloomberg.
The J&J vaccine is a new approach in immunization against AIDS. It hopes to attack several strains of the virus in populations around the world.
For more than three decades, failed vaccine attempts have frustrated scientists, in part because of the nature of the virus, which mutates quickly.
Dan Barouch, a Harvard Medical School professor whose research was fundamental in the creation of the J&J vaccine, said that this approach “brings us one step closer to covering the vast diversity of viruses worldwide,” he said “For medical and global public health reasons, it’s better to have a vaccine that works in multiple parts of the world.”
Previous attempts have focused on a single variety.
For the last 15 years, Barouch has been working on ways to target multiple strains of the virus. Along with the computational biologist Bette Korber, they created a set of “mosaic” proteins that are aimed at raising the immune defense against different strains.
In May, Johnson & Johnson announced that it had successfully enrolled 2,600 women aged 18-35 across five southern African countries — where women and girls experience high rates of HIV infection — in a similar mosaic-based preventive vaccine study.
That study is named “imbokodo,” the Zulu word for “rock,” referring to a proverb in South Africa that about the the strength of women and their importance in the community.
Currently there is only one known method that can reduce the risk of HIV infection by 90% or more: PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) medication has the potential to wipe out HIV/AIDS from the planet, but it needs to be taken daily.
Additionally, its high cost — and corporate greed from drugmakers, according to some HIV activists — have prevented it from happening.
“The cost of treating HIV patients — the burden for patients, the burden for society — is very high,” said Paul Stoffels, J&J’s chief scientific officer. HIV prevention is “a big mission for us. We’ve been working on it for almost 30 years.”
According to Bloomberg, there are two other promising vaccines in late-stage studies.
