The Only HIV vaccine in the late stage of testing has failed according to researchers.
Mosaico the product was able to happen from public partnerships, governments across the world, and the pharmaceutical company Janssen. The trial was held in eight nations in Europe and the United States. The potential vaccine was given to 3,900 men who had sex with other men or were transgender and deemed at substantial risk of getting HIV.
The leaders of the study decided to discontinue the mammoth research effort after an independent data and safety monitoring board reviewed the trial’s findings and saw no evidence the vaccine lowered participants’ rate of HIV acquisition.
Dr. Anthony Fauci said on Wednesday “It’s obviously disappointing.” The Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci has been working on finding a vaccine for HIV for decades and says that there are other paths and there are several things that look promising coming down from the pipeline.
Fauci previously stated that he did not want to retire from the NIAID until there was a vaccine for HIV that proved to be at least 50% effective saying at the time that was good enough for him.
In addition to NIAID and Janssen, which is a division of Johnson & Johnson, the trial was run by the HIV Vaccine Trials Network, which is headquartered in the Fred Hutchinson Research Center in Seattle, and the U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command.
The failure of Mosaico was not expected by many experts in the field. This is the second potential HIV vaccine to fail within the past two years with the other being the Imbokodo clinical trials also failed. A spokesperson for the NIAID said the two trials and research for both potential trials cost 5.6 billion dollars.
Participants in Mosaico, who were between ages 18 and 60, received four injections over 12 months, either of the vaccine or a placebo. The monitoring board found no significant difference in the HIV acquisition rate between the two study groups.
Dr. Anthony Fauci is now looking at the potential use of mRNA technology that was used for the COVID-19 vaccines in a potential HIV vaccine in the future.
Many government agencies and private businesses have committed to finding a vaccine that is effective and safe to use against HIV and is continuing to invest billions of dollars a year in research.
