The revision of the HIV vaccine continues to stall

Expert: there is a chance to create an HIV vaccine in Russia, but there is no money

Oksana Baranova, Pharmaceutical Bulletin

By defeating AIDS, scientists will be able to cope with other chronic diseases, says the director of the Biomedical Center in St. Petersburg Andrey Kozlov.

"Now the task is to defeat AIDS. If it is solved, it will help to cope with other chronic diseases," Andrei Kozlov said in his speech at the seminar of the Summa Technologies expert club.

Under the leadership of Andrey Kozlov, the DNA-4 vaccine against HIV has been tested at the Biomedical Center since the 2000s. In Russia, this is so far the only vaccine that has passed the second phase of clinical trials. However, the work is currently stopped. The center has no financial capacity to resume testing.

"The vaccine has shown its harmlessness and immunogenicity. In some patients, viral reservoirs have collapsed. The result has been obtained, and if we develop it, we will cure patients of the virus," Andrey Kozlov is sure.

It is known that for the second phase of clinical trials, the Biomedical Center was allocated about 50 million rubles under the federal target program "Pharma 2020". Despite the positive results obtained, the scientist insists that it is necessary to scale up the second phase of testing.

He is also sure that Russia has every chance to become the first country to create a vaccine against HIV.

"There is no vaccine against the HIV virus worldwide, as it is very heterogeneous. In Russia, the virus is homogeneous, so there is a chance to make a vaccine," Andrei Kozlov stressed.

He does not consider the problem of lack of funding to be the main one, according to the scientist, first of all "there must be political will".

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru  20.03.2017