New bid to solve HIV vaccine challenge
€11.9m to be spent on international effort to destroy HIV in patients
The EU is pumping €11.9m into a new international effort to create a vaccine that destroys HIV completely in patients. The five year (2010-2015) CUT’HIV project is being co-ordinated by the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris, and includes Finland’s FIT Biotech Oy, Germany’s Geneart, and other university researchers from Britain, Germany, Spain, Peru and Mozambique.
A project communiqué said these experts would pursue ‘innovative approaches for an HIV vaccine enhancing broadly cross-reactive mucosal, humoral and cellular immune responses specific to HIV antigens’.
It noted: ‘Despite significant efforts over the past decade to design new vaccines, including inactivated-live virus, peptides, proteins or non-replicative vectors, a truly effective HIV vaccine is not yet at hand.’