Hospital Clinic has successfully tested an AIDS therapeutic vaccine that has reduced the viral load of this disease in most patients who were provided.

This was the first trial with this vaccine, which was followed by a second whose results will be published later this year or early 2012. For the first study to corroborate the clinician raises the marketing of the vaccine over a period of two or three years.

Josep Maria Gatell, HIVACAT co-director of the research program of vaccines against AIDS and head of the infectious diseases clinic, said yesterday at a press conference that this is the first project of AIDS vaccine being tested in humans. Gatell said that this is a vaccine aimed at the more than 30 million people living with AIDS worldwide, of which 85% live in developing countries.

The vaccine would reach millions of people, especially in poor countries, being a much more expensive than existing antiretroviral drugs, which are very expensive and practically applied only in rich countries. The whole process of creating the vaccine has been developed between 2005 and 2011, and one of the most significant of the whole process has been to have managed to go from one million to one billion viruses in a vaccine.

The vaccine is customized and made from dendritic cells, which are part of the immune system of each patient. This development, according to the investigator said Felipe Garcia, lead author of the study published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases’, has allowed the patient’s defenses have been strengthened by this treatment and could cope with the virus inoculated in the vaccine.

Twenty-four people participated in the trial, half of which shaped the control group and received no vaccine.

The trial authors were unaware of patients who had received the vaccine, a method called double-blind, and none of them had received antiretroviral treatment.

The results, according to Dr. Garcia, have been that patients who were vaccinated were as viral load decreased and there was also a significant increase in their defenses. In the event that vaccine is eventually marketed, its benefits would have two consequences. The first is that patients would stop taking antiretrovirals, which would no longer be subject to a cumbersome system. The second consequence is the considerable savings that would result in the commercialization of the vaccine.

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