Human Test: Novel Vac­cine Stops HIV: “Human Test: Novel Vac­cine Stops HIV

Treat­ment Turns On Anti-HIV Immu­nity, Holds AIDS Virus in Check
By Daniel DeNoon — WebMD Medi­cal News

Nov. 29, 2004 — It wor­ked in mice. It wor­ked in mon­keys. And now in humans, a the­ra­peu­tic vac­cine has stop­ped HIV in its tracks.

The vac­cine is made from a patient’s own den­dri­tic cells and HIV iso­la­ted from the patient’s own blood. Den­dri­tic cells are cru­cial to the immune res­ponse. They grab foreign bodies in the blood and pre­sent them to other immune cells to trig­ger power­ful immune sys­tem res­pon­ses to des­troy the foreign invaders.

HIV infec­tion nor­mally turns these impor­tant immune sys­tem res­pon­ses off. But ani­mal stu­dies show that when den­dri­tic cells are ‘loa­ded’ with whole, killed AIDS viru­ses, they can trig­ger effec­tive immune res­pon­ses that keep infec­ted ani­mals from dying of AIDS.

Wei Lu, Jean-Marie Andrieu, and collea­gues at the Uni­ver­sity of Paris in France and Per­nam­buco Fede­ral Uni­ver­sity in Recife, Bra­zil, tes­ted the vac­cine on 18 Bra­zi­lian patients. All had HIV infec­tion for at least a year. Their T-cell counts — a cru­cial mea­sure of AIDS pro­gres­sion — were drop­ping, mea­ning their disease was wor­se­ning. None was taking anti-HIV medications.

After get­ting three under-the-skin injec­tions of the tailor-made vac­cine, the amount of HIV in the patients’ blood (called the viral load) drop­ped by 80%. After a year, eight of the 18 patients still had a 90% drop in HIV levels. All patients’ T-cell counts stop­ped dropping.

The fin­dings appear in the Decem­ber issue of Nature Medicine.

‘The results sug­gest that [these] vac­ci­nes could be a pro­mi­sing stra­tegy for trea­ting peo­ple with chro­nic HIV infec­tion,’ Andrieu and collea­gues write. ‘The sig­ni­fi­cant dec­rease of viral load as well as maintenance”