By: Clare Watson
The decades-long quest to develop a HIV vaccine has been dealt another major blow, with the 'last true candidate in development' failing to prevent infections any better than a placebo in late-stage clinical trials.
The multinational Mosaico study, which began in 2019 and involved more than 3,900 volunteers, was investigating a four-shot HIV vaccine for cisgender men and transgender people who have sex with cisgender men and/or transgender people.
As the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) reported last week, the trial was stopped after a planned data review by the study's independent data and safety monitoring board found the vaccine was safe, but ineffective.
"For our research partners and others who have waged a decades-long effort to develop vaccines to end the HIV/ AIDS pandemic, these results are disappointing," lead investigator Susan Buchbinder, a HIV researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, said in a statement.
"Although HIV continues to prove uniquely challenging for development of a vaccine, the HIV research community remains fully committed to doing just that, and each study brings us a step closer to this realization."
https://www.sciencealert.com/major-blow-as-experimental-hiv-vaccine-fails-in-late-clinical-trial