The researchers say that an HIV vaccine which could outsmart the lethal virus could be ready for human trail within year. The mosaic vaccine that is being premeditated by team of international researchers functions by being capable to become accustomed to the virus when it mutates.
The HIV virus, which is largely fabricated of proteins that causes AIDS, which is a disease that destroys the immune system of the body leaving patients susceptible to contagions and tumours. About two million people were killed globally by the disease in 2009. The conventional HIV vaccines were premeditated to stimulate the immune system of the body.
The conventional vaccine worked by identifying naturally happening stretches of precise amino acids in the proteins of the virus. But, a mosaic vaccine is made up of several sets of artificial and computer generated series of proteins. These series of proteins can treat immune system of the body to react to a range of HIV mutations.
According to one of the leading researchers, who have worked on the project for twenty years, Bette Korber from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, they are in the evolutionary fast lane studying HIV. If you give just one drug, HIV evolves away from it. That is why treatments involve three or four drugs at once.
The study is composed of large database made by Korber and her team at LANL, containing information from hundreds of thousands of HIV fragments. Such vaccine could break twenty-five year deadlock seeking a cure for the disease that kills two million people a year. The preliminary computer models predicted that mosaic vaccines would perform better than natural HIV genes.
The results were confirmed partly last year when mosaic vaccines aggravated powerful immune responses in both mice and monkeys. Now a group of researchers supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and National Institutes of Health, hope to launch human trials of a mosaic vaccine soon.