Promising HIV vaccine passes phase one human trials with 90% success rate • Hacker News Board

Re: Promising HIV vaccine passes phase one human trials with 90% success rate

#101

Post by StrawberryFrog » Fri, Sep 30, 2011, 9:18 AM UTC

sgentle wrote: post #8

Easy to miss: "The recent human trials involved 30 healthy volunteers, where 24 were treated with MVA-B, while the other 6 were treated with a placebo, carried out over a 48 week period." This test was done on healthy volunteers, not ones with HIV. Although it's promising that 90% of the patients showed an immune response, we don't know how well that immune response translates into therapeutic benefit until it's tria…

As others have pointed out, a the point of a "phase 1 trial" is to find out how safe the treatment is. This drug passed.

Once that is done, how well it works is the Phase 2. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_trial#Phases

Re: Promising HIV vaccine passes phase one human trials with 90% success rate

#102

Post by Tichy » Fri, Sep 30, 2011, 9:44 AM UTC

joshklein wrote: post #11

My father is an infectious disease specialist who has spent the last 30 or so years working on HIV in research, patient treatment, and education. The following thought comes from my casual conversations with him, and probably does not represent his professional opinion. It certainly does not reflect his specific thoughts in regards to this trial, as we haven't yet discussed it. The progress in treating HIV since it f…

Aren't infections more likely to go up if people can survive HIV with medication indefinitely. More survivors means more people who can infect other people?

Re: Promising HIV vaccine passes phase one human trials with 90% success rate

#103

Post by dlikhten » Fri, Sep 30, 2011, 2:19 PM UTC

joshklein wrote: post #11

My father is an infectious disease specialist who has spent the last 30 or so years working on HIV in research, patient treatment, and education. The following thought comes from my casual conversations with him, and probably does not represent his professional opinion. It certainly does not reflect his specific thoughts in regards to this trial, as we haven't yet discussed it. The progress in treating HIV since it f…

Quick question: I thought that vaccines were supposed to be a problem for HIV. They trigger the immune system response which quite literally forces the food of the HIV virus to come to it faster. Vaccines were supposed to speed up the rate of infection. That was supposed to be the paradox of HIV. So question is, is this vaccine really news or just another one of these? Sorry I am not that well versed in this sort of topic.