An AIDS vaccine has passed early human trials

results from animal and early human trials show that a new AIDS vaccine is safe and induces the body's immune response, U.S. researchers said Saturday.
Researchers at Harvard University report in a new issue of the British journal
that the vaccine is a "mosaic vaccine" that stitches together genes from different HIV strains to trigger an immune response to a wider range of HIV strains. It is also the fifth AIDS vaccine in 35 years to enter phase II clinical effectiveness trials. Only one of the previous four vaccines had some protective effect, and the AIDS vaccine, called RV144, reduced the risk of infection by 31%.
latest trial, researchers recruited 393 healthy adults from countries such as South Africa, Thailand and the United States to be randomly given a "mosaic vaccine" or placebo. The results showed that the vaccine successfully induced an antiviral immune response and the subjects were well-resistant.
using 72 macaques, the "mosaic vaccine" protected 48 of them from infection with the immunodeficiency virus (SHIV) embedded in monkeys. Human monkeys are embedded with immunodeficiency virus similar to HIV and can infect monkeys.Professor Dan Baloch of Harvard University, who is lead the
project, said in a statement that the results represented "an important milestone" but "should be interpreted with caution" because the challenge of developing an AIDS vaccine is unprecedented and the successful induction of the body's immune response does not necessarily mean that the vaccine protects humans from HIV infection.
, researchers have launched Phase II clinical effectiveness trials in southern Africa involving 2,600 women at high risk of HIV infection, with results expected in 2021 or 2022. (Source: Xinhua News Agency Zhou Zhou)