The University of California, Los Angeles has an infectious disease specialist named Dr. Jesse Clark. The HIV epidemic has spurred people to try to end it again.
Grace Widyatmadja/NPRA year ago, Dr. Jesse Clark met a man he will never forget.
Clark is an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, Los Angeles. The man looked up at me and said that his mother had died. This was brought into the family by my cousin. She said she was wearing a mask. She got some evidence. She is dead as well. She has two children. What will happen to them?
The man asked if he was going to die of carbon dioxide.
Clark says the man was doing well enough to fight off the disease. He recovered eventually. Clark remembered that moment because it reminded him of another sad and frightening moment in his life.
He was a young man during the early stages of the HIV epidemic.
I am a gay man who was raised in the 80s and 90s before we had effective treatment for HIV. People were dropping dead. Clark had a lump in his throat and asked if he was next.
Many people in the LGBTQ community had a constant fear of dying.
He says that many people outside of that community didn't understand the fear caused by HIV when COVID hit.
Clark says that the fight against HIV has been revived because of the shift in perspective.
Scientists around the world made history. They launched a new vaccine in a record-breaking time. The Commonwealth Fund estimates that the vaccine has averted 2 million deaths and prevented 17 million hospitalizations in the US alone.
Clark says that the HIV vaccine field probably accelerated within a year or two.
The technology that made that breakthrough possible is giving a boost to the development of an HIV vaccine.
Does the field need that boost?
Scientists have been trying to develop an HIV vaccine for 40 years. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the U.S. government, along with philanthropic institutions and pharmaceutical companies, have spent more than 15 billion dollars on the endeavor. Scientists have not made much progress.
"We failed dismally until this point, and I hate to say this, but we have failed before."
It has been challenging to develop an HIV vaccine. It is the same reason that the disease keeps coming back. That is a variant.
HIV has many more variations than SARS-Cov-2. We are talking about many, many more.
William Schief at the Scripps Research Institute says that there are thousands of variations in each person with HIV.
There are millions of HIV variant on Earth, and many of them are being transmitted.
The vaccine needs to protect against all of the HIV variants, as many as 100,000.
On the surface, that seems impossible. Schief and his colleagues have been working on a vaccine for a decade. It is the most sophisticated vaccine ever tried.
The goal of the vaccine is to teach the immune system how to fight HIV. By training the immune system over the course of a series of shots, it can create broadly neutralizing antibodies that can take down the HIV virus even when it starts to evolve inside the body.
In several studies, Schief and his colleagues have shown that the experimental vaccine can cause the production of broadly neutralizing antibodies in mice. Schief says it took 7 to 9 shots to create the antibodies. He hopes the vaccine will work better in people.
We don't think it will take us 9 shots or even 7, but we haven't done it yet. We won't really know until then.
It will take more than a dozen trials to test a complicated vaccine. Schief points out that the testing will be very expensive and time consuming.
The technology comes to the rescue. The flexibility of the vaccine is due to the use of the mRNA technology. They can be adjusted and improved very easily. It is very easy for scientists to change the shape of the vaccine.
Schief says that the process for an mRNA vaccine will be much faster and less expensive. It is still not cheap, but it is less expensive to make.
The COVID Pandemic made it plausible that the experimental vaccine would be developed quickly. Researchers and pharmaceutical companies had no choice but to test the technology in people because of the Pandemic. Schief says that within a year, they proved the technology works.
He says they didn't know before that the technology was safe and effective.
The first clinical trials of an mRNA vaccine for HIV were launched by the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative in January.
It has been nearly 40 years since a vaccine was approved, but researchers are optimistic about the future.
In Los Angeles, Dr. Jesse Clark is helping to lead one of the trials that helped to test Moderna's vaccine.
Clark is very proud to be a part of this trial and I can see that.
Clark, who directs the UCLA South American Program in HIV Prevention Research, went to medical school to be an HIV specialist.
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