An HIV vaccine candidate — PENNVAX-GP— manufactured by Inovio Pharmaceuticals and backed by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, has displayed some of the highest levels of immune response rates ever generated in a human study of an HIV vaccine.
To assess the vaccine's efficacy, researchers enrolled 94 participants in the study, 85 of which received the candidate vaccine either through intradermal or intramuscular injection. Seventy-six of the vaccinated participants were evaluated in the study. Seventy-one of these participants displayed a cellular immune response to at least one of the vaccine antigens. None of the placebo recipients demonstrated a cellular response in the study, according to researchers. Among the 28 participants who received the vaccine via intradermal injection, 27 demonstrated a cellular response and an HIV-specific antibody response.
"These results are among the highest ever responses we've seen with an HIV vaccine, and they are remarkably consistent with our recent data reported from our Ebola, Zika and MERS clinical trials in terms of demonstrating nearly 100 percent vaccine response rates with very favorable safety profile," said J. Joseph Kim, PhD, president and CEO of Inovio. "Furthermore, our newer and more tolerable intradermal vaccine delivery device showed that we can elicit very high immune responses at a much lower dose. We look forward to advancing PENNVAX-GP into later-stage clinical development with our partners and collaborators."
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