Moderna using tech from COVID shot in exploratory vaccine for HIV

The pandemic has spurred new research by scientific community

Researchers have started administering doses of an experimental HIV vaccine that uses the breakthrough mRNA technology in Moderna’s coronavirus shot.

U.S. biotech firm Moderna and the nonprofit International Aids Vaccine Initiative are exploring the use of mRNA technology, which prompts the body to make a protein that triggers an immune response (the technology is also used in Pfizer’s coronavirus shot).

Researchers will monitor 56 HIV-negative adults for six months in the Phase 1 clinical trial, typically the first step in a long road to study the safety and efficacy of a vaccine.

George Washington University, one of the locations where the trial is taking place, described it as the first human trial of a mRNA-based HIV vaccine.

Nearly four decades of research and advocacy have produced medications that transformed HIV into a manageable virus, though there still is no vaccine to help prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths a year. While dozens of attempts have been abandoned before preclinical or clinical stages of evaluation, the HIV research helped hone technologies that were repurposed against COVID-19.

The coronavirus pandemic has marshaled global resources, and billions of dollars from governments and private companies, into research into coronavirus vaccines, which were fast-tracked and developed in record time.

Scientists have sought to harness that momentum in the long-standing battle against other threats. In October, the World Health Organization endorsed the world’s first malaria vaccine for use in children — production of that vaccine was slowed by the difficulty of targeting a parasite and securing funding to prevent a disease most destructive in poorer parts of the world.

Last year, a broad study that had raised hopes of a vaccine for HIV ended in failure after an interim analysis showed it was no more effective than a placebo. It was the seventh full-scale human trial of a vaccine for HIV, which newly infected 1.5 million people worldwide in 2020, according to U.N. data.

The new trial in the United States, which Moderna announced began on Thursday, will test a hypothesis that delivering HIV immunogens through mRNA technology can spur the body to produce antibodies which neutralize a range of HIV variants.