HIV-AIDS

AIDS is caused by an infection of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). Antiviral medications can delay HIV growth and can prevent AIDS development. Furthermore, these compounds can prevent transmission from the virus from an infected person to a non-infected individual. However, we see that those antivirals are not able to prevent the spread of this pandemic worldwide as there are approximately 1.5 million newly infected people each year. Therefore, we hope that effective vaccines against HIV are more efficient in stopping the spread of HIV. Already more that 35 years have been passed to find an effective vaccine. Unfortunately, no effective vaccines have been developed yet, but the search continuous.

The HIV prime-boost vaccination study against HIV, which started in 2020 as part of a large EU consortium, has been finalized this year. Despite the use of newly developed vaccine candidates (and the vaccination strategy tested), they failed to induce strong immune responses in the rhesus macaques. The candidates tested did not induce stronger and/or broader immune responses as compared to earlier evaluated vaccine candidates. Still in vitro analysis is ongoing to investigate the (lack of) effectiveness of these latest vaccine candidates against HIV.