Domestic HIV vaccine: the opinion of a pessimist
Non-unique Russian HIV vaccine
It turned out to be the DNA-4 vaccine, developed in St. Petersburg.
The following is known about the vaccine. It consists of four plasmids (ring DNA), each of which encodes one of the HIV proteins. The origin of these proteins is quite interesting. HIV of subtype A. Due to the high diversity of the virus, each isolate has a slightly different sequence in Russia. A consensus (averaged) sequence of these viruses was taken, the codons were optimized and the corresponding genes were synthesized in order to create a vaccine specifically aimed at the Russian epidemic. Vaccination consists in intramuscular injection of these plasmids. Plasmids enter the cells at the injection site and begin to synthesize viral proteins (the possibility of creating a live virus is excluded here). In response to these proteins, immunity is produced, mainly cellular.
In 2007, an article was published about testing this vaccine in mice. It has been shown that it causes an immune response, but, as far as I understand, very little. I can't say for sure, because the method used by the authors differs from those generally accepted in the West (I won't say that this method is worse, but because of the difference in approach, it is quite difficult to make an adequate comparison with other vaccines). But from the data given, we can say that the observed immune response disappears quite quickly, within 4-5 weeks.
In 2010-2011, the first stage of the trial was conducted on 20 volunteers. I haven't seen the results, the article is still in the works. And now they are going to conduct the second stage of testing on 60 volunteers. However, if the vaccine was originally developed as a preventive one, now it will be tested as a therapeutic one, i.e. to try to stimulate an immune response to HIV in already infected people.
Unlike the unusual nanoparticles from Novosibirsk, DNA vaccination attempts are fairly standard, began 25 years ago and have been practically abandoned by today, because it turned out that the immune response to DNA vaccines is rather weak and short-term. If you look at recent clinical trials of DNA-containing therapeutic HIV vaccines, you can see that no one is injecting naked DNA into the muscles now. People are trying to improve efficiency by using electroporation or intradermal application, adding immunomodulating molecules (sometimes both together), or combining DNA vaccines with other vaccination methods, such as viral vectors. The results there, in fact, are not great, but still better than with naked DNA.
The transition from a preventive vaccine to a therapeutic one at the second stage is also not unique. Unfortunately, this is a fairly common phenomenon and it is connected with this. The first stage usually tests the safety of the vaccine, and in the second stage, in addition to safety, they try to get some preliminary data on the effectiveness. But for a preventive HIV vaccine, it is impossible to obtain any data on the effectiveness of infection prevention on less than a few hundred volunteers. Such tests are very expensive, complex, take a lot of time, and therefore only five have been done in the world in all 30 years of research. Therapeutic tests at the second stage can be done on relatively small groups of volunteers and the result can be obtained quickly. Therefore, many research groups say "What the hell is not joking, let's try it" and test their vaccines as therapeutic. Several dozen such tests were made and all of them showed very modest results.
With the advent of effective therapy, the field of therapeutic vaccines was generally abandoned. Now interest has resumed, largely due to attempts to create a way to completely cure HIV. Most experts in our field believe that therapeutic vaccines themselves have no future, that they will have to be used in combination with other methods of suppressing the virus. But some enthusiasts continue to work on therapeutic vaccines.
PS: Naturally, statements in newspapers and news websites that in a few years this Russian HIV vaccine may appear on the market are complete nonsense. These things are not done so quickly.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru16.06.2014