The European Commission recently financed the European AIDS Vaccine Initiative (EAVI2020) that unites top HIV scientists from biotech companies and public organizations from around the world to create HIV vaccines.
Uniting these minds will help the medical community in Europe improve its focused efforts in creating therapeutic and protective vaccines for HIV. The researchers traveled from 22 institutions to collaborate with their expertise and knowledge. Their innovative vaccine candidates may be used in human trials within the next five years.
There is a worldwide pandemic of HIV-1, which infects 35 million people. The virus continues to spread, infecting more than 2 million people each year.
Health experts maintain that the best way to protect people from contracting the virus is a vaccine. Their goal is to use a protective vaccine to eliminate the pandemic entirely. It is believed that a therapeutic vaccine would help lessen the clinical course of HIV and potentially make new approaches to eliminate viruses entirely.
There have been 30 years of research dedicated to HIV vaccines. The health community still does not have an effective vaccine for the virus or a method of decreasing the virus’s progression rate. Part of the reason for this is the challenge in finding vaccine modalities and immunogens that have a decreased risk of failure in the developmentally late stage.
The commission’s job is to represent and uphold the interests of the E.U. as a whole. It is headed by 28 commissioners, one per represented country.
