Despite nearly 40 years of research, there is still no vaccine to fight HIV/AIDS. However, recent discussions at the 24th International AIDS Conference in Montreal raised hopes that this scenario could change. About a year after the world’s first awareness of Covid-19, two vaccines that lessen the threat of this disease have been approved for use through the Food and Drug Administration. Lessons learned in the progression of these vaccines can encourage efforts to expand an HIV/AIDS vaccine.
As I have already described, HIV/AIDS and Covid-19 differ in many tactics. HIV and SARS-CoV-2 are other viruses that are transmitted in other tactics and cause very different diseases. In addition, structural and biological differences between these two viruses have affected our ability to expand effective vaccines.
In a review of this factor presented at AIDS 2022, Dr. Lynn Morris of South Africa’s National Institute of Communicable Diseases described some of those differences. First, the HIV genome is embedded in our DNA. As a result, their genetic material, the style for creating new viral particles, remains embedded in our cells, our immune system.
Second, HIV mutates at a very high rate. Despite existing considerations about SARS-CoV-2 variants, the genome of this virus is stable. HIV, on the other hand, has a much higher mutation rate. As a result, HIV exhibits greater structural diversity, which counteracts our immune response. Third, the HIV envelope protein, functionally equivalent to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, has a complex shape and is fully glycosylated or sugar-coated. answer.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, largely neutralizing antibodies, or bnAbs, appear to spread only in a minority of other HIV-infected people and only years after the initial infection. This hinders one of the main tactics in which vaccines work.
In a nutshell, highly neutralizing antibodies are proteins produced through our immune formula that can block infection through genetically and structurally varied variants of a virus. Such antibodies can be effective weapons against viral infections. However, herbal HIV infections usually do not lead to its formation. Vaccination methods explored in recent years have also failed to stimulate its development. The result? Our immune formula does not clear the virus after an herbal infection and the potential vaccines tested so far do not block new infections well.
In a 2019 paper in Science, Dr. Barton Haynes of Duke University’s Human Vaccines Institute and colleagues defined a strategy to fix this problem. They noted that the few HIV-directed bnAbs that have been characterized involve a number of “unlikely mutations. “which probably arose from the maturation of the immune cells that produce them. The trick, then, would possibly be to use a booster vaccination strategy in which the number one vaccine motivates the immune formula to produce bnAb precursors and the secondary vaccine then turns into the rare cells that have accumulated the mutations needed to make bnAb effective and mature. The concept is simple. However, households for effective secondary vaccines have not been determined.
As Dr. Haynes noted in AIDS 2022, classic techniques for vaccine progression, which typically use proteins to boost the immune system, are slow and expensive. The Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccines, however, use an mRNA platform. The technique has several benefits over the more classic vaccine progression processes. In particular, it is less expensive and faster. In theory, many other vaccines can be developed and tested relatively temporarily. secondary vaccines. Hopefully, one of them will induce neutralizing antibodies that have been widely sought after for a long time.
The search for an effective HIV vaccine has been a slow and arduous process. But the 40-year struggle has benefited the vaccine box in many ways. We have a greater understanding of the human immune formula through paintings about HIV. It could be said that Covid-19 Vaccines have evolved so temporarily in part due to learned CLASSES of HIV. Now, perhaps learned Covid-19 classes will have an effect on the progression of an HIV vaccine.
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