Why Haven’t Researchers Developed an HIV Vaccine or Cure Yet?
Kira Peikoff was the editor-in-chief of Leaps.org from 2017 to 2021. As a journalist, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, Nautilus, Popular Mechanics, The New York Academy of Sciences, and other outlets. She is also the author of four suspense novels that explore controversial issues arising from scientific innovation: Living Proof, No Time to Die, Die Again Tomorrow, and Mother Knows Best. Peikoff holds a B.A. in Journalism from New York University and an M.S. in Bioethics from Columbia University. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and two young sons. Follow her on Twitter @KiraPeikoff.
Last week, top experts on HIV/AIDS convened in Amsterdam for the 22nd International AIDS conference, and the mood was not great. Even though remarkable advances in treating HIV have led to effective management for many people living with the disease, and its overall incidence has declined, there are signs that the virus could make a troubling comeback.
"In a perfect world, we'd get a vaccine like the HPV vaccine that was 100% effective and I think that's ultimately what we're going to strive for."
Growing resistance to current HIV drugs, a population boom in Sub-Saharan Africa, and insufficient public health resources are all poised to contribute to a second AIDS pandemic, according to published reports.
Already, the virus is nowhere near under control. Though the infection rate has declined 47 percent since its peak in 1996, last year 1.8 million people became newly infected with HIV around the world, and 37 million people are currently living with it. About 1 million people die of AIDS every year, making it the fourth biggest killer in low-income countries.
Leapsmag Editor-in-Chief Kira Peikoff reached out to Dr. Carl Dieffenbach, Director of the Division of AIDS at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to find out what the U.S. government is doing to develop an HIV vaccine and cure. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
What is the general trajectory of research in HIV/AIDS today?
We can break it down to two specific domains: focus on treatment and cure, and prevention.
Let's start with people living with HIV. This is the area where we've had the most success over the past 30 plus years, because we've taken a disease that was essentially a death sentence and converted it through the development of medications to a treatable chronic disease.
The second half of this equation is, can we cure or create a functional cure for people living with HIV? And the definition of functional cure would be the absence of circulating virus in the body in the absence of therapy. Essentially the human body would control the HIV infection within the individual. That is a much more, very early research stage of discovery. There are some interesting signals but it's still in need of innovation.
I'd like to make a contrast between what we are able to do with a virus called Hepatitis C and what we can do with the virus HIV. Hep C, with 12 weeks of highly active antiviral therapy, we can cure 95 to 100% of infections. With HIV, we cannot do that. The difference is the behavior of the virus. HIV integrates into the host's genome. Hep C is an RNA virus that stays in the cytoplasm of the cell and never gets into the DNA.
On the prevention side, we have two strategies: The first is pre-exposure prophylaxis. Then of course, we have the need for a safe, effective and durable HIV vaccine, which is a very active area of discovery. We've had some spectacular success with RV144, and we're following up on that success, and other vaccines are in the pipeline. Whether they are sufficient to provide the level of durability and activity is not yet clear, but progress has been made and there's still the need for innovation.
The most important breakthrough in the past 5 to 10 years has been the discovery of broad neutralizing monoclonal antibodies. They are proteins that the body makes, and not everybody who's HIV infected makes these antibodies, but we've been able to clone out these antibodies from certain individuals that are highly potent, and when used either singly or in combination, can truly neutralize the vast majority of HIV strains. Can those be used by themselves as treatment or as prevention? That is the question.
Can you explain more about RV144 and why you consider it a success?
Prior to RV144, we had run a number of vaccine studies and nothing had ever statistically shown to be protective. RV144 showed a level of efficacy of about 31 percent, which was statistically significant. Not enough to take forward into other studies, but it allowed us to generate some ideas about why this worked, go back to the drawing board, and redesign the immunogens to optimize and test the next generation for this vaccine. We just recently opened that new study, the follow-up to RV144, called HVTN702. That's up and enrolling and moving along quite nicely.
Carl Dieffenbach, Director of the Division of AIDS at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
(Courtesy)
Where is that enrolling?
Primarily in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Africa.
When will you expect to see signals from that?
Between 2020 and 2021. It's complicated because the signal also takes into account the durability. After a certain time of vaccination, we're going to count up endpoints.
How would you explain the main scientific obstacle in the way of creating a very efficacious HIV vaccine?
Simply put, it's the black box of the human immune system. HIV employs a shield technology, and the virus is constantly changing its shield to protect itself, but there are some key parts of the virus that it cannot shield, so that's the trick – to be able to target that.
So, you're trying to find the Achilles' Heel of the virus?
Exactly. To make a flu vaccine or a Zika vaccine or even an Ebola vaccine, the virus is a little bit more forthcoming with the target. In HIV, the virus does everything in its power to hide the target, so we're dealing with a well-adapted [adversary] that actively avoids neutralization. That's the scientific challenge we face.
What's next?
On the vaccine side, we are currently performing, in collaboration with partners, two vaccine trials – HVTN702, which we talked about, and another one called 705. If either of those are highly successful, they would both require an additional phase 3 clinical trial before they could be licensed. This is an important but not final step. Then we would move into scale up to global vaccination. Those conversations have begun but they are not very far along and need additional attention.
What percent of people in the current trials would need to be protected to move on to phase 3?
Between 50 and 60 percent. That comes with this question of durability: how long does the vaccine last?
It also includes, can we simplify the vaccine regimen? The vaccines we're testing right now are multiple shots over a period of time. Can we get more like the polio or smallpox vaccine, a shot with a booster down the road?
We're dealing with sovereign nations. We're doing this in partnership, not as helicopter-type researchers.
If these current trials pan out, do you think kids in the developed world will end up getting an HIV vaccine one day? Or just people in-at risk areas?
That's a good question. I don't have an answer to that. In a perfect world, we'd get a vaccine like the HPV vaccine that was 100% effective and I think that's ultimately what we're going to strive for. That's where that second or third generation of vaccines that trigger broad neutralizing antibodies come in.
With any luck at all, globally, the combination of antiretroviral treatment, pre-exposure prophylaxis and other prevention and treatment strategies will lower the incidence rate where the HIV pandemic continues to wane, and we will then be able to either target the vaccine or roll it out in a way that is both cost effective and destigmatizing.
And also, what does the country want? We're dealing with sovereign nations. We're doing this in partnership, not as helicopter-type researchers.
How close do you think we are globally to eradicating HIV infections?
Eradication's a big word. It means no new infections. We are nowhere close to eradicating HIV. Whether or not we can continue to bend the curve on the epidemic and have less infections so that the total number of people continues to decline over time, I think we can achieve that if we had the political will. And that's not just the U.S. political will. That's the will of the world. We have the tools, albeit they're not perfect. But that's where a vaccine that is efficacious and simple to deliver could be the gamechanger.
Kira Peikoff was the editor-in-chief of Leaps.org from 2017 to 2021. As a journalist, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, Nautilus, Popular Mechanics, The New York Academy of Sciences, and other outlets. She is also the author of four suspense novels that explore controversial issues arising from scientific innovation: Living Proof, No Time to Die, Die Again Tomorrow, and Mother Knows Best. Peikoff holds a B.A. in Journalism from New York University and an M.S. in Bioethics from Columbia University. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and two young sons. Follow her on Twitter @KiraPeikoff.
Two-and-a-half year-old Huckleberry, a blue merle Australian shepherd, pulls hard at her leash; her yelps can be heard by skiers and boarders high above on the chairlift that carries them over the ski patrol hut to the top of the mountain. Huckleberry is an avalanche rescue dog — or avy dog, for short. She lives and works with her owner and handler, a ski patroller at Breckenridge Ski Resort in Colorado. As she watches the trainer play a game of hide-and-seek with six-month-old Lume, a golden retriever and avy dog-in-training, Huckleberry continues to strain on her leash; she loves the game. Hide-and-seek is one of the key training methods for teaching avy dogs the rescue skills they need to find someone caught in an avalanche — skier, snowmobiler, hiker, climber.
Lume’s owner waves a T-shirt in front of the puppy. While another patroller holds him back, Lume’s owner runs away and hides. About a minute later — after a lot of barking — Lume is released and commanded to “search.” He springs free, running around the hut to find his owner who reacts with a great amount of excitement and fanfare. Lume’s scent training will continue for the rest of the ski season (Breckenridge plans operating through May or as long as weather permits) and through the off-season. “We make this game progressively harder by not allowing the dog watch the victim run away,” explains Dave Leffler, Breckenridge's ski patroller and head of the avy dog program, who has owned, trained and raised many of them. Eventually, the trainers “dig an open hole in the snow to duck out of sight and gradually turn the hole into a cave where the dog has to dig to get the victim,” explains Leffler.
By the time he is three, Lume, like Huckleberry, will be a fully trained avy pup and will join seven other avy dogs on Breckenridge ski patrol team. Some of the team members, both human and canine, are also certified to work with Colorado Rapid Avalanche Deployment, a coordinated response team that works with the Summit County Sheriff’s office for avalanche emergencies outside of the ski slopes’ boundaries.
There have been 19 avalanche deaths in the U.S. this season, according to avalanche.org, which tracks slides; eight in Colorado. During the entirety of last season there were 17. Avalanche season runs from November through June, but avalanches can occur year-round.
High tech and high stakes
Complementing avy dogs’ ability to smell people buried in a slide, avalanche detection, rescue and recovery is becoming increasingly high tech. There are transceivers, signal locators, ground scanners and drones, which are considered “games changers” by many in avalanche rescue and recovery
For a person buried in an avalanche, the chance of survival plummets after 20 minutes, so every moment counts.
A drone can provide thermal imaging of objects caught in a slide; what looks like a rock from far away might be a human with a heat signature. Transceivers, also known as beacons, send a signal from an avalanche victim to a companion. Signal locators, like RECCO reflectors which are often sewn directly into gear, can echo back a radar signal sent by a detector; most ski resorts have RECCO detector units.
Research suggests that Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR), an electromagnetic tool used by geophysicists to pull images from inside the ground, could be used to locate an avalanche victim. A new study from the Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories suggests that a computer program developed to pinpoint the source of a chemical or biological terrorist attack could also be used to find someone submerged in an avalanche. The search algorithm allows for small robots (described as cockroach-sized) to “swarm” a search area. Researchers say that this distributed optimization algorithm can help find avalanche victims four times faster than current search mechanisms. For a person buried in an avalanche, the chance of survival plummets after 20 minutes, so every moment counts.
An avy dog in training is picking up scent
Sarah McLear
While rescue gear has been evolving, predicting when a slab will fall remains an emerging science — kind of where weather forecasting science was in the 1980s. Avalanche forecasting still relies on documenting avalanches by going out and looking,” says Ethan Greene, director of the Colorado Avalanche Information Center (CAIC). “So if there's a big snowstorm, and as you might remember, most avalanches happened during snowstorms, we could have 10,000 avalanches that release and we document 50,” says Greene. “Avalanche forecasting is essentially pattern recognition,” he adds--and understanding the layering structure of snow.
However, determining where the hazards lie can be tricky. While a dense layer of snow over a softer, weaker layer may be a recipe for an avalanche, there’s so much variability in snowpack that no one formula can predict the trigger. Further, observing and measuring snow at a single point may not be representative of all nearby slopes. Finally, there’s not enough historical data to help avalanche scientists create better prediction models.
That, however, may be changing.
Last year, an international group of researchers created computer simulations of snow cover using 16 years of meteorological data to forecast avalanche hazards, publishing their research in Cold Regions Science and Technology. They believe their models, which categorize different kinds of avalanches, can support forecasting and determine whether the avalanche is natural (caused by temperature changes, wind, additional snowfall) or artificial (triggered by a human or animal).
With smell receptors ranging from 800 million for an average dog, to 4 billion for scent hounds, canines remain key to finding people caught in slides.
With data from two sites in British Columbia and one in Switzerland, researchers built computer simulations of five different avalanche types. “In terms of real time avalanche forecasting, this has potential to fill in a lot of data gaps, where we don't have field observations of what the snow looks like,” says Simon Horton, a postdoctoral fellow with the Simon Fraser University Centre for Natural Hazards Research and a forecaster with Avalanche Canada, who participated in the study. While complex models that simulate snowpack layers have been around for a few decades, they weren’t easy to apply until recently. “It's been difficult to find out how to apply that to actual decision-making and improving safety,” says Horton. If you can derive avalanche problem types from simulated snowpack properties, he says, you’ll learn “a lot about how you want to manage that risk.”
The five categories include “new snow,” which is unstable and slides down the slope, “wet snow,” when rain or heat makes it liquidly, as well as “wind-drifted snow,” “persistent weak layers” and “old snow.” “That's when there's some type of deeply buried weak layer in the snow that releases without any real change in the weather,” Horton explains. “These ones tend to cause the most accidents.” One step by a person on that structurally weak layer of snow will cause a slide. Horton is hopeful that computer simulations of avalanche types can be used by scientists in different snow climates to help predict hazard levels.
Greene is doubtful. “If you have six slopes that are lined up next to each other, and you're going to try to predict which one avalanches and the exact dimensions and what time, that's going to be really hard to do. And I think it's going to be a long time before we're able to do that,” says Greene.
What both researchers do agree on, though, is that what avalanche prediction really needs is better imagery through satellite detection. “Just being able to count the number of avalanches that are out there will have a huge impact on what we do,” Greene says. “[Satellites] will change what we do, dramatically.” In a 2022 paper, scientists at the University of Aberdeen in England used satellites to study two deadly Himalayan avalanches. The imaging helped them determine that sediment from a 2016 ice avalanche plus subsequent snow avalanches contributed to the 2021 avalanche that caused a flash flood, killing over 200 people. The researchers say that understanding the avalanches characteristics through satellite imagery can inform them how one such event increases the magnitude of another in the same area.
Avy dogs trainers hide in dug-out holes in the snow, teaching the dogs to find buried victims
Sarah McLear
Lifesaving combo: human tech and Mother Nature’s gear
Even as avalanche forecasting evolves, dogs with their built-in rescue mechanisms will remain invaluable. With smell receptors ranging from 800 million for an average dog, to 4 billion for scent hounds, canines remain key to finding people caught in slides. (Humans in comparison, have a meager 12 million.) A new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience revealed that in dogs smell and vision are connected in the brain, which has not been found in other animals. “They can detect the smell of their owner's fingerprints on a glass slide six weeks after they touched it,” says Nicholas Dodman, professor emeritus at Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University. “And they can track from a boat where a box filled with meat was buried in the water, 100 feet below,” says Dodman, who is also co-founder and president of the Center for Canine Behavior Studies.
Another recent study from Queens College in Belfast, United Kingdom, further confirms that dogs can smell when humans are stressed. They can also detect the smell of a person’s breath and the smell of the skin cells of a deceased person.
The emerging avalanche-predicting human-made tech and the incredible nature-made tech of dogs’ olfactory talents is the lifesaving “equipment” that Leffler believes in. Even when human-made technology develops further, it will be most efficient when used together with the millions of dogs’ smell receptors, Leffler believes. “It is a combination of technology and the avalanche dog that will always be effective in finding an avalanche victim.”
Living with someone changes your microbiome, new research shows
Some roommate frustration can be expected, whether it’s a sink piled high with crusty dishes or crumbs where a clean tabletop should be. Now, research suggests a less familiar issue: person-to-person transmission of shared bacterial strains in our gut and oral microbiomes. For the first time, the lab of Nicola Segata, a professor of genetics and computational biology at the University of Trento, located in Italy, has shown that bacteria of the microbiome are transmitted between many individuals, not just infants and their mothers, in ways that can’t be explained by their shared diet or geography.
It’s a finding with wide-ranging implications, yet frustratingly few predictable outcomes. Our microbiomes are an ever-growing and changing collection of helpful and harmful bacteria that we begin to accumulate the moment we’re born, but experts are still struggling to unravel why and how bacteria from one person’s gut or mouth become established in another person’s microbiome, as opposed to simply passing through.
“If we are looking at the overall species composition of the microbiome, then there is an effect of age of course, and many other factors,” Segata says. “But if we are looking at where our strains are coming from, 99 percent of them are only present in other people’s guts. They need to come from other guts.”
If we could better understand this process, we might be able to control and use it; perhaps hospital patients could avoid infections from other patients when their microbiome is depleted by antibiotics and their immune system is weakened, for example. But scientists are just beginning to link human microbiomes with various ailments. Growing evidence shows that our microbiomes steer our long-term health, impacting conditions like obesity, irritable bowel syndrome, type 2 diabetes, and cancer.
Previous work from Segata’s lab and others illuminated the ways bacteria are passed from mothers to infants during the first few months of life during vaginal birth, breastfeeding and other close contact. And scientists have long known that people in close proximity tend to share bacteria. But the factors related to that overlap, such as genetics and diet, were unclear, especially outside the mother-baby dyad.
“If we look at strain sharing between a mother and an infant at five years of age, for example, we cannot really tell which was due to transmission at birth and which is due to continued transmission because of contact,” Segata says. Experts hypothesized that they could be caused by bacterial similarities in the environment itself, genetics, or bacteria from shared foods that colonized the guts of people in close contact.
Strain sharing was highest in mother-child pairs, with 96 percent of them sharing strains, and only slightly lower in members of shared households, at 95 percent.
In Italy, researchers led by Mireia Valles-Colomer, including Segata, hoped to unravel this mystery. They compared data from 9,715 stool and saliva samples in 31 genomic datasets with existing metadata. Scientists zoomed in on variations in each bacterial strain down to the individual level. They examined not only mother-child pairs, but people living in the same household, adult twins, and people living in the same village in a level of detail that wasn’t possible before, due to its high cost and difficulties in retrieving data about interactions between individuals, Segata explained.
“This paper is, with high granularity, quantifying the percent sharing that you expect between different types of social interactions, controlling for things like genetics and diet,” Gibbons says. Strain sharing was highest in mother-child pairs, with 96 percent of them sharing strains, and only slightly lower in members of shared households, at 95 percent. And at least half of the mother-infant pairs shared 30 percent of their strains; the median was 12 percent among people in shared households. Yet, there was no sharing among eight percent of adult twins who lived separately, and 16 percent of people within villages who resided in different households. The results were published in Nature.
It’s not a regional phenomenon. Although the types of bacterial strains varied depending on whether people lived in western and eastern nations — datasets were drawn from 20 countries on five continents — the patterns of sharing were much the same. To establish these links, scientists focused on individual variations in shared bacterial strains, differences that create unique bacterial “fingerprints” in each person, while controlling for variables like diet, demonstrating that the bacteria had been transmitted between people and were not the result of environmental similarities.
The impact of this bacterial sharing isn’t clear, but shouldn’t be viewed with trepidation, according to Sean Gibbons, a microbiome scientist at the nonprofit Institute for Systems Biology.
“The vast majority of these bugs are actually either benign or beneficial to our health, and the fact that we're swapping and sharing them and that we can take someone else's strain and supplement or better diversify our own little garden is not necessarily a bad thing,” he says.
"There are hundreds of billions of dollars of investment capital moving into these microbiome therapeutic companies; bugs as drugs, so to speak,” says Sean Gibbons, a microbiome scientist at the Institute for Systems Biology.
Everyday habits like exercising and eating vegetables promote a healthy, balanced gut microbiome, which is linked to better metabolic and immune function, and fewer illnesses. While many people’s microbiomes contain bacteria like C. diff or E. coli, these bacteria don’t cause diseases in most cases because they’re present in low levels. But a microbiome that’s been wiped out by, say, antibiotics, may no longer keep these bacteria in check, allowing them to proliferate and make us sick.
“A big challenge in the microbiome field is being able to rationally predict whether, if you're exposed to a particular bug, it will stick in the context of your specific microbiome,” Gibbons says.
Gibbons predicts that explorations of microbe-based therapeutics will be “exploding” in the coming decades. “There are hundreds of billions of dollars of investment capital moving into these microbiome therapeutic companies; bugs as drugs, so to speak,” he says. Rather than taking a mass-marketed probiotic, a precise understanding of an individual’s microbiome could help target the introduction of just the right bacteria at just the right time to prevent or treat a particular illness.
Because the current study did not differentiate between different types of contact or relationships among household members sharing bacterial strains or determine the direction of transmission, Segata says his current project is examining children in daycare settings and tracking their microbiomes over time to understand the role genetics and everyday interactions play in the level of transmission that occurs.
This relatively newfound ability to trace bacterial variants to minute levels has unlocked the chance for scientists to untangle when and how bacteria leap from one microbiome to another. As researchers come to better understand the factors that permit a strain to establish itself within a microbiome, they could uncover new strategies to control these microbes, harnessing the makeup of each microbiome to help people to resist life-altering medical conditions.