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Japanese newspaper The Asahi Shimbun reports that a team of Japanese researchers has developed a vaccine that killed a form of the human immunodeficiency viruses (HIV) in macaques.
Although HIV infection is not a good thing, there are ways to improve your chances of getting it.
However, treatment has not been able to eradicate the virus. It can only be reduced in severity. However, this could be changing. According to Asahi, the Japanese team at Tsukuba Primate Center claimed that human testing could begin within five years.
A special bacterium, which boosts the immune system, was used by the team to create a vaccine. The vaccine was then combined with an HIV-causing virus that is weaker.
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According to Asahi, the seven test subjects were crab-eating macaques and infected by simian HIV. However, tests could not detect the virus. Six of seven subjects were infected with a stronger virus, which could have been fatal. However, the virus vanished without trace in six of them.
Researchers now hope to use HIV from HIV-positive patients undergoing drug therapy in order to develop a vaccine for humans.
This is not the only major effort to create an HIV vaccine. Moderna, a US-based pharmaceutical company, recently began human trials for its mRNA HIV vaccine. This technology is similar to the widely used COVID-19 vaccine.
Over the past 40 years, HIV has been a deadly infectious disease. There is more hope than ever with modern medicine to eradicate the virus.
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READ MORE: A research team has developed a vaccine to kill HIV in monkeys [The Asahi Shimbun]
Read more about HIV: Human Trials for Moderna's mRNA HIV Vaccine are About to Begin
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