The St. Petersburg HIV vaccine is being tested on the first volunteers
Who is on the HIV vaccination?
Olga Ostrovskaya, St. Petersburg Vedomosti, 02.11.2010
Today, the first phase of clinical trials of a DNA vaccine against HIV begins on the basis of the I. P. Pavlov St. Petersburg Medical University: within a month, 21 volunteers will be vaccinated with an experimental drug created within the walls of the St. Petersburg Biomedical Center and the State Research Institute of Especially Pure Biopreparations. By February, when this phase of testing is completed, scientists will receive the first data on the safety of their vaccine and its immunogenicity
Worldwide, work on an AIDS vaccine began more than 12 years ago – almost simultaneously, both the United States and Russia adopted special government programs. In our country, scientists from Moscow, St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk worked on the creation of the vaccine, and the project was led by St. Petersburg microbiologist Professor Andrey Petrovich Kozlov.
It is clear that the financing of the American program is not comparable with the Russian one, and no one was surprised that it was the American so-called candidate vaccines that were the first to enter the stage of human testing, which has been held in Thailand for the past few years.
Unfortunately, the effectiveness of these vaccine variants turned out to be low, no more than 30%. In addition, the American vaccine, no matter how effective it turns out to be in the future, is unlikely to be useful to Russians: HIV already has at least ten different subtypes, and subtype B is common in the USA, and in our country there is a completely different kind of virus, subtype A.
As you know, it is the incredible variability of the human immunodeficiency virus that is the biggest problem for the creators of the vaccine. This is probably why scientists came to the conclusion that vaccines based on the viral genome can be the most promising: the staff of the biomedical center, in order to develop their own version of the DNA vaccine, had to completely decode the genome (10 thousand pairs of nucleotides) of the same subtype A.
The volunteers for the tests were selected by the staff of the Pavlov St. Petersburg State Medical University, who have considerable experience in such studies: it was here a year ago that the swine flu vaccine was tested.
All participants in the tests are necessarily healthy people. The DNA vaccine should increase their immunity at the cellular level, but at the same time, antibodies to the virus, which are used today to determine human HIV infection, should not appear in the blood.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru02.11.2010