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Finally! Vaccination for HIV diseases may protect people; says new study

Speed News Desk | Updated on: 8 July 2018, 14:41 IST

Medical science has cured many diseases and now a new study reveals HIV vaccine that has the potential to protect people around the world as the treatment has shown promising results.

The treatment, which aims to provide immunity against various strains of the virus, produced an anti-HIV immune system response in tests on 393 people, a study in the Lancet found.

Since it is a huge discovery so the researcher needs more testing to determine if the immune response produced can prevent HIV infection in people.

It has been estimated that about 37 million people worldwide live with HIV or Aids, and there are an estimated 1.8 million new cases every year.

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The technology has done a lot in this world and has made our life easy and comfortable. But despite advances in treatment for HIV, both a cure and a vaccine for the virus have so far remained elusive.

Inventing a vaccine has proved an immense challenge for scientists, in part because there are so many strains of the virus, but also because HIV is adept at mutating to elude attack from our immune systems.

The scientists carried out a parallel study where they gave rhesus monkeys the vaccine to check for the analysis to protect monkeys from getting simian-human immunodeficiency virus - a virus which is similar to HIV that infects monkeys.

The mosaic vaccine combination that showed the most promise in humans was found to protect around 67% of the 72 monkeys from getting the HIV disease.

"These results represent an important milestone," said Dan Barouch, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and lead author of the study. However, Prof Barouch also cautioned that the findings needed to be interpreted with caution. Though the vaccine triggered a response in the immune system of the people who took it, it is not clear if this would be enough to fight off the virus and prevent infection. "The challenges in the development of an HIV vaccine are unprecedented, and the ability to induce HIV-specific immune responses does not necessarily indicate that a vaccine will protect humans from HIV infection," he added.

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First published: 8 July 2018, 14:41 IST