Now get ready for HIV vaccine
cases of infected patients who appear to be genetically immune to the virus – and can keep their viral load to undetectable levels, without drug treatment. Last year, researchers found zero traces of HIV in a 66- year- old Californian woman, despite the fact she was diagnosed with the virus in 1992.
The scientists believe these outliers are somehow able to drive viral particles into a section of human
DNA where the are ‘silenced’ by the immune system. If they can figure out the gene that enables a rare few to achieve this, a cure would be at their fingertips.
Elsewhere, pharmaceutical giant Moderna – famed for its Covid-19 vaccine – may have finally cracked an HIV vaccine. The jab uses sophisticated gene- editing technology to train the immune system to produce a variety of HIV-like particles, to familiarise the body with many mutations. It is currently undergoing human trials. Today, 97 per cent of people living with HIV in Britain are non- i nfectious, thanks to ART treatment. The battle is far from over in other countries, with hundreds of thousands of infections a year occurring, mostly in Africa and Eastern Europe.
But UK new diagnoses are under 4,000 a year and dropping by ten per cent annually.
And so, last year came yet another target, this time from the UK’s
Health Secretary, Matt Hancock: no new infections by 2030.
Will we reach it? Dr Waters is cautiously optimistic.
‘It’s possible,’ she says. ‘The key is helping people not to be afraid of HIV, by telling them a diagnosis is not life- limiting, it’s just somewhere in the background.
‘ A diagnosis can even prompt positive, healthy changes in people’s lives. If I’d have said that just a couple of decades ago, people would have thought I was crazy.’