July 28, 2017 BY imani leave a comment
Developing a vaccine to stop HIV is thought to be among the most daunting challenges in medicine for one big reason: The virus is extraordinarily genetically diverse, even more so than the flu. So it’s difficult to think about how a single shot might work against all the different HIV subtypes circulating around the world.
But scientists may be inching toward a vaccine that could tackle HIV’s genetic diversity and prevent the virus from taking hold in people.
Researchers from the National Institutes of Health and Johnson & Johnson at the International AIDS Society conference in Paris Monday morning presented data on a clinical trial of what’s called the “Ad26-env mosaic vaccine.”
The mosaic vaccine was developed using a computer algorithm to analyze HIV data from around the world and select a range of HIV sequences to include in a shot. It’s called a “mosaic” because it involves taking pieces of different viruses and sticking them together to generate immune responses that can cover a broad range of HIV subtypes.
“One of the great challenges for development of HIV vaccine is viral diversity,” said Dan Barouch, a lead researcher on the vaccine and director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. “The mosaic strategy is one way to attempt to deal with the global virus diversity.”