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Promising Vaccine Candidate Could Lead To a Definitive Cure For HIV
Zothecula writes "A very promising vaccine candidate for HIV/AIDS has shown the ability to completely clear the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), a very aggressive form of HIV that leads to AIDS in monkeys. Developed at the Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute at the Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU), the vaccine proved successful in about fifty percent of the subjects tested and could lead to a human vaccine preventing the onset of HIV/AIDS and even cure patients currently on anti-retroviral drugs."
Which is why they spent over $500 million in 2011 just on HIV vaccine clinical trials? Sorry, your argument doesn't really hold water, and anyway the company that *does* come up with the vaccine will make a killing.
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
Not just make a killing, but will put all the other companies out of business as their treatments become worthless.
This sounds really interesting...
It sounds like, instead of infecting the patient with a blunted virus that would eventually die away, they are permanently infecting the patient with a persistent virus that looks and acts like their target but causes no harm to keep up the immune response over the long haul. Sounds to me like a really interesting approach.
Maybe someone could enlighten me to the history of this approach in the treatment of other diseases, or is it novel?
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
Besides any vaccination campaign would take some years to ramp up and anti-retrovirals become less effective and ultimately go out of patent over time any way. So it's not like their business is going to go bust over night or wouldn't have drawn to a natural end anyway.
You don't buy tinfoil hats. The ones you buy are all compromised. Learn how to build a tinfoil hat yourself.
Only if they price it so that everyone who needs it can afford it. Obviously that won't happen, they will want to maximize profit in rich countries instead of practically giving it away in Africa, so all those poor people will still need the other cheaper treatments.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Actually, a number of big pharma companies do give away (or sell at cost) to poor regions like sub-Saharan Africa the same medications they charge an arm and a leg for in the richer parts of the world. Where the process breaks down is when a disease disproportionally affects a poor region (like malaria) such that there is not a fiscally sound business model for pursuing the high risk/benefit research involved with drug development.
As an aside, I think that one of the most commendable fields of the Gates Foundation is their promotion of research for malaria (see the TED talk where Gates releases a jar of mosquitoes into the audience).
As someone who actually worked on (albeit briefly) an HIV vaccine candidate, I'd like to comment that there have been a number of successful anti-SIV vaccines already, each of which have gone on to miserable -- and expensive -- failures when the underlying technology was applied to an HIV vaccine. And for those candidates that actually made it to human trials before failure, each attempt had a human cost as well (conspiracy theorists, go fuck yourselves).
That being said, the approach used is rather clever, if someone risky. The technique used is what is known as a "Heterologous Antigen" delivery, but in this case it has been combined with a persistent agent that establishes a life-long infection. The vector used was Rhesus Cytomegalovirus, which has a analogous human virus known as Human Cytomegalovirus, aka Herpesvirus-5.
CMV is a very common infection (in some countries 90+%, although somewhat lower in the United States). It's generally considered harmless to healthy individuals, and most pick it up during childhood, where it is commonly passed around in daycare centers and such. Initial symptoms are usually mild and non-specific (although in some individuals it can produce Mono-like symptoms), and typically afterwards the viral infection is well-controlled with no further signs of infection. Unlike some more famous members of the Herpesvirus family, it does not produce any sores or vesicles or such.
However, on occasion it can be dangerous, as one of the infectious agents that can sometimes result in TORCH syndrome effects (like the infamous "Blueberry Muffin Baby") when primary infections (first encounter with the infectious agent for an individual) occurs in a pregnant women. It can also be dangerous in immunosuppressed individuals, such as organ transplant recipients and advanced AIDS patients.
I'm just waiting for there to be an accidental release of smallpox. I know that nearly no one from my generation on has been vaccinated. A single out break of that in a major metro area and international airport would be one of the most devastating things our generation could witness.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Nah, then they will just pay someone to write a paper stating that HIV vaccine causes autism.