After decades of hugely-funded researches, HIV still does not have a vaccine, rendering the disease still incurable and ever so life-threatening. The light may now be shining at the end of the tunnel, though. Researchers have decided to skirt the usual process in vaccine development. In other words, they have discovered that to create a vaccine for HIV, they needed to develop not a vaccine in the strictest sense of the word. Instead, they used gene transfer technology ‘that produces molecules that block infection.’

“We used a leapfrog strategy, bypassing the natural immune system response that was the target of all previous HIV and SIV vaccine candidates,” said study leader Philip R. Johnson, M.D., chief scientific officer at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Johnson’s team employed a new strategy and developed it over a period of 10 years. Johnson was in close collaboration with K. Reed Clark, Ph.D., a molecular virologist at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.

Funding the study were grants from the National Institute of Allergic and Infectious Diseases of the National Institutes of Health. Other collaborators on the study were Jianchao Zhang of the Nationwide Children’s Hospital, Columbus, Ohio; Eloisa Yuste and Ronald C. Desrosiers of the New England Primate Research Center and Harvard Medical School; and Bruce C. Schnepp, Mary J. Connell, and Sean M. Greene, of Children’s Hospital and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

Clinical trials of all the vaccines thus far developed for HIV have produced negative results. These vaccine developments ‘used substances aimed at stimulating the body’s immune system to produce antibodies or killer cells that would eliminate the virus before or after it infected cells in the body.’ Unfortunately, the ‘body fails on its own to produce an effective response against HIV during natural HIV infection.’

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Via ScienceDaily