Moderna's Experimental HIV Vaccine Could Begin Human Trials as Soon as This Week
Moderna will start trialling its experimental mRNA-based HIV vaccine as early as tomorrow (19 August), according to a new submission to the US National Institutes of Health Clinical Trial registry.
Moderna will start trialling its experimental mRNA-based HIV vaccine as early as tomorrow (19 August), according to a new submission to the US National Institutes of Health Clinical Trial registry.
The Phase 1 trial will reportedly involve 56 healthy adults aged 18 to 50 who do not have HIV, and will test the safety of the vaccine as well as look for a basic immune response. The vaccine candidate is functionally similar to the mRNA system that's been so successful in Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine.
For years, researchers have been investigating the potential of mRNA vaccines, but the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines are the first to have been used in humans, and both have been shown to be safe and broadly successful at preventing and reducing severity of SARS-CoV-2 infection.
Moderna will be trialling two versions of its new vaccine candidate, officially called mRNA-1644 (the variant is known as mRNA-1644v2-Core). This is the first mRNA vaccine against HIV to be trialled in humans.
There will be four groups as part of the trial – two receiving a mix of the vaccine versions, and two receiving one or the other.
At this early stage, the trial isn't 'blind', which means everyone who receives the vaccine will know what they're getting. That's because right now the researchers aren't trying to work out how well the vaccine works. This first phase will last approximately 10 months, and they just want to make sure it's safe and that it mounts a basic immune response.
If the vaccine passes this phase, they will still need to go through phase 2 and phase 3 trials to determine how well they work at preventing HIV infection in the broader population.
So how do mRNA vaccines work? Unlike traditional vaccines, which usually contain some part of a weakened or inactivated virus, mRNA vaccines contain an 'instruction booklet' that's passed into our cells and tells them how to make fragments of specific proteins that sit on the outside of the target virus.
For a short period of time (usually 24 to 48 hours), our cells start to make these proteins, and our bodies mark them as foreign and mount an immune response. Hopefully that means when you're exposed to the actual virus, your body will recognize the spike proteins and be quick enough to fight it off before infection becomes too severe.
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