If since 1996, the cocktails of antiviral drugs have proved successful in reducing to undetectable levels of the virus and have AIDS, at least in Western countries, chronic illness, the hope has long conjured a preventive vaccine, has so far backfired. It's still not a preventive vaccine is talking about a new scientific work, but a therapeutic vaccine which, however, opens interesting perspectives. This is a work primarily directed at Barcelona (13 of 17 researchers, 3 of the 4 others being INSERM-Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Hopital Pitie-Salpetriere in Paris) and involves two clutches AIDS in the Catalan capital, teachers Clotet (IrsiCaixa) and Gatell (Hivacat).
This work appeared in the Journal of Infectious Diseases [1] and available online, reports the results obtained during a Phase I clinical trial on people with HIV: 24 weeks after the first of three injections, vaccinated patients showed an enhanced immune response viral load and three times lower than the control group. This decline which the authors define as modest, has remained at least 48 weeks.
This vaccine is actually a vaccine tailored: from the blood of each patient, researchers have recovered part of the AIDS virus they were inactivated by heating and other dendritic cells (the immune system cells). They then grew the cells in contact with the virus to their "learn" to attack the virus. It is these cells that were injected into each patient. This strategy is not new and is being attempted in other research groups around the world but what is new in this work are the positive results were obtained.
Feasible, safe and well tolerated, to use the adjectives used by researchers in their paper, this strategy is therefore hopeful even though the side "to measure" will always be a limitation. The idea is, if future trials sanctioned the therapeutic approach would be to treat a patient with antivirals and vaccine to maintain without the aid of drugs, viral load very low. This is the meaning of new tests that are ongoing and which researchers believe have results within a year. Continued ...
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[1] "A Dendritic Cell-Based Therapeutic Vaccine for HIV-1 Infection" by Felipe Garcia et al., Published in J Infect Dis. (2011) 203 [4] 473-478. doi: 10.1093/infdis/jiq077
- The scientific article in question
- El Pais on February 2, 2011
- La Vanguardia of February 2, 2011
Editor: Guy
Molénat, scientific attaché, service. scientifique@sst-bcn.com
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