Decades of research on HIV vaccines boost vaccine bid against coronavirus

“Another horrifying illness is about to lose patience, tenacity and total genius,” Heckler said.

These decades of research on HIV have taught scientists a huge amount about the immune system, and honed vaccine technology is now being reused against coronaviruses, making it a disease-causing pathogen. Created a global infrastructure of pivotable clinical trial networks-19.

Due to the sheer amount of money spent on HIV, there are laboratories, laboratories and recruitment networks rushed to act against coronaviruses. Facilities and expertise are in place. Infection control has been upgraded. Regulators are involved.

“Investing in HIV research has enabled us to address covid-19,” said the HIV vaccine study, who is head of the Virology and Vaccine Research Center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Dan H. Barouch says. One of the leading candidates for coronavirus vaccine.

Linda Galebecker, Deputy Director of the HIV Center for Desmond Tutu at the Institute of Infectious Diseases and Molecular Medicine, University of Cape Town, South Africa, said: ..

HIV is a terribly complex virus that skillfully and skillfully uses vaccine efforts, but there is real reason to expect the coronavirus to become a less resilient enemy. However, only by leveraging the HIV vaccine effort can coronavirus research go very fast.

“For those who are leaders in the HIV vaccine and prevention community, this was a truly dramatic and rapid turning point,” said Nina Russell, deputy director of tuberculosis and HIV programs at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Told.

According to the resource tracking of the HIV Prevention Research and Development Working Group, a project of advocacy group AVAC, approximately $14.5 billion was spent on research into the HIV vaccine between 2000 and 2018. As the group’s data show, 46 vaccines survived preclinical or clinical stages of evaluation, and an additional 100 were abandoned early in the process.

Two efforts are currently taking place.

“There are many immunology and virology researchers in HIV, so we established a laboratory. [vaccine] Meg Doherty, Head of WHO’s Global HIV, Hepatitis and STI Program Division, said:

Science is gambling and one or more of these efforts Produce and deploy coronavirus vaccine within 12 to 18 months.. Researchers are encouraged by the main differences between viruses. HIV is built into the cells of the body. That is, the vaccine must start working immediately to eradicate the disease. The people’s immune system is unable to overcome HIV naturally, making vaccines more difficult to make. And it mutates much faster than the new coronavirus, officially named SARS-CoV-2.

“It’s certainly not a trivial matter, but what gives me hope is the natural history of this infection,” said Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health. Many people who experience mild symptoms or none at all are good indications that the immune system can kill the virus.

“It’s different from HIV,” Collins said. “This is a candidate for a vaccine that works. With proper priming, the immune system can eliminate the virus.”

Many years of research on vaccines have helped scientists with perfect techniques and methods that can be transferred to coronaviruses, From RNA And DNA vaccine To a virus that uses a harmless virus to deliver a gene from a virus to a cell.

For example, Barouch for 15 years, HIV vaccine research.. He developed a vaccine technology based on the harmless cold virus that delivers specific genes to cells. These genes encode the characteristic parts of the AIDS virus and trigger an immune response.

An HIV vaccine based on that study is being developed in collaboration with pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson, and is still in clinical use when Barouch held an annual laboratory retreat at the Science Museum in Boston on Friday, January January. Was tested in the exam. The main topic of discussion was 41 known cases and new pneumonia in Wuhan, China, where one died at a time.

Seemingly few today, with more than 12.5 million confirmed cases worldwide, Barouch and his lab found the news alarming at the time. They decided that something should be done.

That night, The viral genome sequence was shared online It was started by Chinese researchers, and Balouch’s lab started working on it. It didn’t take long to reach out to pharmaceutical partner Johnson & Johnson to launch a vaccine that will begin testing humans this month.

They reused a vaccine platform originally developed for HIV and Ebola by inserting genetic material that encodes a characteristic spike protein of coronavirus. Theoretically, we need to develop anti-coronavirus antibodies that trigger the immune system and protect people from infection. According to Baluch, the laboratory and its industry partners would not have been able to respond so quickly without HIV infection.

For many years, the United States has built a large network to carry out the logistically complex clinical trials needed to test HIV vaccines and prophylactics. Larry Collie, a virologist, former chairman of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, and co-lead of the Covid-19 Preventive Trials Network, said that almost every aspect of conducting 30,000 clinical trials of the vaccine is , Said it is based on the foundation of HIV.

This can range from the data collection and biostatistics expertise needed to analyze large trials to community relationships and the experience of engaging vulnerable people in complex medical experiments.

NIH announced COVID-19 (new coronavirus infectious disease) (# If there is no character limit, add parentheses when first appearing Prevention network on Wednesday. It is a fusion of several different large clinical trial networks, two of which were taken directly from HIV.

Leaders now acknowledge that challenges and scales are different. Although the world’s population is vulnerable to coronaviruses, not everyone is at risk of HIV.

According to Corey, the network may have spent years preparing to start the trials currently under consideration, but it should be completed in just a few weeks.

The more trivial but essential aspect of clinical trials is that results are not guaranteed. Freezers audited to prove they don’t fail, experienced staff of recruiters, and operations managers accustomed to performing years of experimentation.

Richard Inback, Head of Infectious Diseases at the University of Illinois in Chicago, said: “NIH has invested a huge amount of money over the years in developing an international network capable of conducting this kind of test. School of Medicine. “Fortunately, when they were there Ready to go to, otherwise development will take years.”

According to Becker from the University of Cape Town, an important lesson from HIV is that it is taking many approaches to vaccines at the same time. Experiments with HIV vaccines often tend to be one after another, with the entire community waiting for the best candidate results. In contrast, many coronavirus tests are being conducted simultaneously.

“If you want to do this quickly and make sure that there is a winner, have horses doing different things in the race,” she said. And because the world’s population is threatened, some safe and effective vaccines may be needed.

The world “may need multiple winners,” she said.

Leaders of the effort say that years of experience building and building relationships with the minority, vulnerable and marginalized communities for HIV trials will help. However, due to the speed and scale of the trials, coronaviruses add new complexity. For example, older people in the minority community have traditionally not been the focus of HIV prevention trials, but are an important group to protect against coronaviruses.

Nelson Michael, director of the Center for Infectious Diseases Research at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, said: “We need to be humble about the fact that we have never worked with any of these groups.