The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a branch of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), recently began an initiative to further develop long-lasting treatments and prevention for HIV infections.
NIAID and GalxoSmithKline (GSK), a worldwide pharmaceutical company, have developed a public-private partnership to support the initiative. The partnership allows scientists to create one or more bNAbs, which are designed to protect people from a variety of HIV strains. They have proved effective in protecting human cells in laboratory models.
“NIAID scientists and grantees have pioneered the discovery and development of HIV broadly neutralizing antibodies,”
NIAID Director
Anthony Fauci said. “This new partnership between our government scientists and GSK provides a pathway to accelerate the innovations needed to produce new and longer-acting agents for preventing and treating HIV.”
Now the goal is to make a treatment of prevention out of the bNAbs to further help people against the virus.
“This is an exciting time for the field, as we continue to discover HIV antibodies with progressively better neutralizing capacity,” John Mascola, NIAID’s Vaccine Research Center director, said. “Partnering with GSK will help design a new landscape, where we can advance HIV broadly neutralizing antibodies to evaluate their potential for treatment and prevention of HIV infection.”
