In France, 173,000 people are HIV-positive, which means they are living with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). This virus attacks the body’s immune defences: if HIV infection is not controlled (by the combination of several antiretroviral drugs), it evolves until it causes AIDS – or “syndrome of acquired immunodeficiency”.
This Thursday, August 19, 2021, the American laboratory Moderna (which has already designed a vaccine against Covid-19) announced that it has started a clinical trial of a potential RNA vaccine against AIDS. Phase 1 of this clinical trial should be completed in mid-2023. This phase 1 trial will be carried out on a sample of 56 people aged 18 to 50 who are not infected with HIV and in good health.
HIV is very different from the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus
As a reminder, messenger RNA vaccines (such as the Moderna vaccine or the Pfizer/BioNtech vaccine against Covid-19) provide the body’s cells with the “recipe” (messenger RNA) to manufacture certain proteins useful for defending themselves. against viruses. Very fragile, the messenger RNA is destroyed just after having transmitted this information, and cannot in any case modify the genome.
The Moderna laboratory therefore hopes to develop a messenger RNA vaccine against AIDS: this vaccine would prevent the activation of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in the body, thus protecting against AIDS.
This vaccine (which will probably not be available for ten years, according to the Moderna laboratory) may however be difficult to develop: “HIV is a very different virus from Sars-CoV-2 in that it integrates, that is to say that it has the particularity of integrating its genetic material into the chromosome of the cells it infects, reminded Jean-Christophe Paillart, director of research at the CNRS, to our colleagues from Numerama. This makes it much more difficult to target since it is transmitted from cell to cell and can remain dormant (latency) in the infected cell and reactivate at any time.“
Read also :
- HIV patients are more likely to develop a severe form of Covid-19
- PrEP (Truvada): what you need to know about this HIV preventive treatment
- AIDS: first transmission of a multi-resistant strain of HIV in France