One Vaccine That Can Cure HIV? They’re On It!

A team of scientists affiliated with Duke University in North Carolina, the United States, has developed an experimental vaccine that has the potential to cure HIV, and its findings represent a step forward toward a definitive cure for the deadly infection.

“This is a scientific feat and gives the field great hope that one can construct an HIV vaccine regimen that directs the immune response along a path that is required for protection,” says Glenda Gray, an HIV expert and the president and CEO of the South African Medical Research Council.

The Duke study shares the findings related to a 2019 clinical trial conducted on 20 patients – two of four planned doses for 15 of them and three doses for five of them – who received the investigational vaccine, which triggers an elusive type of broadly neutralizing antibodies that can recognize and block different versions of the virus. “Parts of the virus look like our own cells, and we don’t like to make antibodies against ourselves,” explains Barton Haynes, director of the Duke Human Vaccine Institute and one of the paper’s authors. Upon testing the antibodies on HIV samples, they neutralized between 15% and 35% of them. Since it was first identified in 1983, HIV infected more than 85 million people worldwide and caused some 40 million deaths.