An AIDS vaccine might be closer than what scientists and medical professionals had previously believed. A new approach, which formed a compound that has been blocking the HIV infection nearly entirely in the monkeys that it had been tested on. Scientists believe that the blocking nature of the vaccine will function just as well against AIDS in humans. Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases pointed out that “It’s very impressive, and the method is quite promising. But it’s still just in an animal model, so we’ll need to see evidence of whether it works in humans.”
The technique though, and the actual compound are the two things that scientists are so excited about. According to work that the scientists have done with the monkeys and this vaccine, the monkeys have been protected for more than a year against the virus. Interestingly, scientists didn’t expect that the vaccination would last as long as it did, and actually this proved to be a better scenario than what they had originally hoped for.
The study was published in Nature, the science journal, and this really begins to break the walls down in the HIV and AIDS space, as it pertains to getting closer to breakthroughs in humans. It’s a virus and disease that have plagued humans for over 40 years in a major way and is historically one of the deadliest viruses that have ever presented themselves in the medical community.
The way the compound works, is it blocks the sites at which the HIV protein would actually be set to multiply. With the cell being unable to reproduce the virus it is stopped in its tracks. This is the kind of breakthrough that could completely change the landscape of the medical world. Keeping the cost low though would be an important factor in this vaccine, and also, figuring out how often the vaccine would actually be necessary to function well-enough to allow those infected to live a carefree life after the time of infection.
