For tens of years thousands of researchers have been trying to find a cure byHuman immunodeficiency virus, better known as AIDS or HIV. Now a team of researchers from theInfectious Diseases and AIDS Service of the Hospital Clínico de Barcelonahas taken another step on this path by presenting a therapeutic vaccine that has shown more than encouraging results in trials …
And it is that in the tests carried out on 36 patients who were following an antiretroviral therapy (known as ART), after the test vaccination “the virus / host balance changed in favor of the host” , or what is the same, the virus lost the battle of infection. According to the data, after 12 weeks the reduction in viral load thanks to the vaccine was 90 percent, although later the virus becomes resistant and manages to mitigate the effect of the vaccine.
To stop the spread of the AIDS virus, the researchers pulsed dendritic cells (those that present antigens to the immune system) from HIV patients themselves and inactivated them with heat. In this way, when the dendritic cells “presented” the virus to the lymphocytes in charge of eliminating the external infectious agent, HIV was not able to infect the lymphocyte (as it normally happens), but instead manages to adequately transmit the message to activate the immune system and kill off the infecting foreign agent.
As Felipe García, senior researcher of the HIVACAT project, promoted by the IDIBAPS-Hospital Clínic and IrsiCaixa explains, the vaccine “has shown to be capable of inducing a specific response that has been associated with a significant control of viral replication . It has also been a safe vaccine with a good tolerance on the part of the patients “. And the fact is that, although functional cure has not been achieved in any case, “it brings us closer to the final objective that patients can stop antiretroviral treatment”, explains García.
In short, as the Hospital Clínico de Barcelona points out, “this is the most solid demonstration in the scientific literature that a therapeutic vaccine is feasible” . The study has been published in the specialized scientific journal Science Translational Medicine .
