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The world may soon have a preventive cure against HIV — a vaccine. Fourty-eight healthy adult volunteers will be enrolled for clinical trials for a new anti-HIV vaccine candidate.
The volunteers will receive two doses of the vaccine, developed by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), or a placebo. The doses will be spaced two months apart and administered as an intramuscular injection.
Trial centres
The trial is taking place at two sites: George Washington University (GW) in Washington and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington.
In pre-clinical trials and in animal experiments, it had produced desirable results. They were effective against many of the genetically diverse strains of HIV, and in animal studies, they blocked infection of a virus similar to HIV.
Over the past 15 years, scientists have gained an unprecedented understanding of the structure of HIV’s outermost envelope protein, which is the target of broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs). From large cohort studies of HIV-infected volunteers, researchers isolated and characterised many bNAbs that develop naturally, but only rarely, during the course of HIV infection, and identified where they bind to the virus. These sites of vulnerability on the virus were then used to design vaccine immunogens, using what is referred to as a ‘structure-based vaccine design’ approach.
The eOD-GT8 60mer vaccine candidate was developed in the laboratory of William Schief, director of vaccine design for IAVI’s Neutralizing Antibody Center (NAC) at Scripps Research. It is the first candidate to enter clinical trials that was designed using a structure-based vaccine approach, and it is the first in a sequence of engineered vaccine candidates that Schief and his colleagues are developing.
Results next year
“In this trial, our goal is to prove that it is possible to induce responses from special, targeted B cells,” said Schief. “We’ll have a promising outcome if some of the vaccine recipients produce B cells expressing a specific type of antibody, whereas placebo recipients do not. This would confirm that we are able to induce the desired initial immune response, and the next step will be making technical refinements to improve performance.”
Results of the IAVI G001 trial are expected in late 2019.
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