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One Step Closer to HIV Vaccine Development

June 04, 2014

Researchers at Duke have made a significant step toward the development of a vaccine for the virus that causes AIDS.

For the first time, researchers were able to track the very earliest stages of the virus, as well as the body’s earliest immune response to it. What they learned puts them on a path to be able to develop a new vaccine. To date, a vaccine for HIV has been an unreachable goal because of the virus’s ability to change quickly and avoid the attack of the immune system. “The next step is to use what we’ve learned to make sequential viral envelopes and test them as experimental vaccines,” says Barton Haynes, MD, director of the Duke Human Vaccine Institute. “This is a process of discovery, and we’ve come a long way.”

Read the press release, Researchers Find Potential Map to More Effective HIV Vaccine.