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HIV Cure: Progress Continues But Still a Long Way to Go

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Candy Swift
HIV Cure: Progress Continues But Still a Long Way to Go

AIDS has seriously affected human health and socioeconomic development over the past 40 years, but there is neither an effective preventive vaccine nor a drug that can eradicate this viral infection.

Current highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) is effective in suppressing HIV replication and reducing the viral load to undetectable levels in the blood. However, due to the presence of a latent reservoir of the virus, HIV can rebound rapidly after stopping the medication. Also, because of long-term drug use, patients face problems such as accumulation of drug toxicity and viral mutation resistance.

Therefore, the research of new long-lasting treatment and prevention methods for HIV is a major scientific issue and a challenge for research.

l AIDS vaccine development faces multiple challenges

Since the first case of AIDS was discovered in 1981, humanity has realized that an AIDS vaccine is one of the most effective means to end the epidemic. Unfortunately, however, no effective AIDS vaccine has yet been put into clinical use.

There is a wide range of HIV vaccines, including inactivated vaccines, live attenuated vaccines, protein subunit vaccines, DNA vaccines, and viral vector vaccines. However, due to the extremely high variability of HIV, it randomly mutates with each replication generation in the human body. Vaccines or drugs need to target the appropriate sites in order to work, and the constant mutation of the virus can result in drug resistance and failure of the vaccine or drug, so the chance of successful HIV vaccine development is relatively low.

The lack of ideal animal models is another important reason that hinders the development of vaccines; HIV only infects humans, not animals, and cannot replicate in animals, making it difficult to conduct preclinical in vitro testing of AIDS vaccines and to verify the safety and efficacy of vaccines.

In addition, clinical trials are actually very risky. Once the vaccine fails to work, then one may face the risk of lifelong infection. This is also one of the reasons why a valid vaccine has not yet been developed.

l Antibody therapy is already being used in clinical trials

In the course of the battle against AIDS, HIV antibody discovery has made progress that mankind has discovered an effective defender against HIV, a broad-spectrum neutralizing antibody (bnAbs). It can recognize areas on the surface of HIV strains that are not susceptible to change, and thus has the ability to capture multiple strains, inhibit viral replication in patients, and effectively reduce the level of HIV in the human body. 

bnAbs, which are mainly isolated and purified from the blood of infected patients, can neutralize HIV strains directly and prevent the virus from invading immune cells, or they can stimulate other immune cells in the body after neutralizing the virus and work together to destroy the virus or the cells infected by the virus.

While antiretroviral drugs inhibit and interfere with HIV after it enters the body's infected cells, bnAbs block the virus before it infects the cells.

At present, research on bnAbs is still ongoing. The mechanism of its production is not fully understood, and some clinical trials are trying to induce bnAbs in humans to make vaccines, but they are not successful yet.

In recent years, several new drugs for AIDS have been marketed both at home and abroad, and thanks to this, AIDS has been transformed from a lethal disease to a chronic disease that is treatable.  

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Candy Swift
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