He said that the clinical trial and the research around it have proven the strategy for creating a vaccine is on the right path. Scripps’ antigen, the precursor to a vaccine, elicited the correct response in 97% of the human test subjects.But they’re sort of baby broadly neutralizing antibodies. They need to learn more. They need to gain mutations,” Schief said.
Burton compares the search for an HIV vaccine to a baseball game, in which getting all the way to home base means a vaccine is ready.Today many people with HIV are able to live well by taking antiretroviral drugs every day. But Burton says in places like sub-Saharan Africa, where HIV cases are higher, those drugs are expensive and are often inaccessible.
Schief said if his research does hit a home run, and a vaccine is developed, groups like the World Health Organization and some charitable foundations would need to get it to the patients most at risk. “I've spoken with epidemiologists in South Africa who deal with the people most at risk,” Schief said. “And I said to them, ‘If we do get this to work … could you deliver that to the people most at risk?’ And they said yes.”