Will We Ever Have a Vaccine for HIV? – AARP

The HIV virus mutates at a really high rate, he says. We hear so much about variants of COVID-19, but it doesnt mutate nearly as rapidly as HIV does.

Whats more, the HIV virus has a different structure that sets it apart from other common viruses, Wessner notes. The surface proteins on it are heavily coated with sugars, he says. This makes it harder for our immune system to recognize the virus proteins and mount a response.

Theres one more hurdle that makes the development of an HIV vaccine challenging: When youre exposed to a virus, either through infection or a vaccine, your body develops antibodies, or proteins that your immune system makes to help fight the virus. These antibodies also protect you against future infection. But most people infected with HIV dont develop whats known as broadly neutralizing antibodies, which are needed to fight variants, as they do with other viruses, Wessner explains. That means their bodies cant clear the virus after an initial infection, and it also makes it much harder for potential vaccines to block new infections.

The mRNA vaccines approved to prevent infection with COVID-19 were revolutionary. And the exact same technology may be what gets us to the finish line for an HIV vaccine, says Steven Deeks, M.D., an HIV specialist, vaccine researcher and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).

AnmRNA vaccineworks by delivering a piece of genetic material that instructs your body to make a protein fragment of the virus, which your immune system recognizes and remembers, so it can create a robust immune response if its exposed to it again.

With this technology, we can develop new vaccines and test them much more quickly than we did in the past, Deeks says. This means researchers will be able to design vaccines rapidly and learn whether they are able to create the broadly neutralizing antibodies required for a successful HIV vaccine.

But the COVID-19 pandemic has also created some hurdles for vaccine development.

Weve seen a lot of setbacks in our HIV goals, as resources that could have gone towards HIV vaccine research went towards creating a COVID-19 vaccine instead, says Monica Gandhi, M.D., professor of medicine and director of the UCSF Center for AIDS Research in San Francisco. In addition, there are concerns that some of the vaccine hesitancy seen during the COVID-19 pandemic could spill over to an HIV vaccine, when one is finally developed, Wessner says. We saw this with the human papillomavirus vaccine as well, he says. There may be a lot of resistance if an HIV vaccine becomes available to the general public.

Up until recently, the most promising line of research was investigating whether injecting healthy people with broadly neutralizing antibodies can protect against HIV. Scientists mass-produced one antibody, known as the VRC01 antibody, discovered in the blood of a patient living with HIV.

Initial research suggested that it might be up to 75 percent effective in preventing HIV transmission. Buta 2021 studythat followed more than 4,000 at-risk people for 20 months found that this antibody was able to block only about 30 percent of the HIV strains circulating in a community.

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Will We Ever Have a Vaccine for HIV? - AARP