Johnson & Johnson Ending Human HIV Vaccine Testing

With vaccines heavy on the mind as we continue navigating the pandemic, new technologies have allowed pharmaceutical companies to look into developing the long-needed HIV vaccine to help end HIV/AIDS for good. Johnson & Johnson is one of those companies, though they have announced they will end human testing for an HIV vaccine that showed early promise, saying it did not show a high enough level of effectiveness.

The company’s study involved 2,600 young women in sub-Saharan Africa deemed high risk for acquiring HIV. Researcher plan to continue a separate, late-stage trial on a variant of the vaccine being tested on men and trans people in Europe and the U.S.

The African study showed only a 25 percent effectiveness in preventing HIV transmission.

“HIV is a unique and complex virus that has long posed unprecedented challenges for vaccine development because of its ability to attack, hijack, and evade the human immune system,” says Dr. Paul Stoffels, Johnson & Johnson chief scientific officer.

Moderna is another pharmaceutical company that recently announced their intent to begin human trials for their own HIV vaccine. Moderna is also reportedly looking into an influenza vaccine with the same technology.

The vaccines already passed Phase I testing earlier in the year, involving testing for safety with a handful of human volunteers. The second phase tests the vaccine’s overall effectiveness, and Phase III will have Moderna looking at its efficacy over other prevention treatments currently on the market, like pre-exposure prophylaxis (PreP).

Moderna’s HIV vaccine will be the first of its kind to use messenger RNA (mRNA), which is the same approach the company used in their COVID-19 vaccine. The mRNA vaccines do not contain parts of a virus, but they instead create proteins that trigger an immune response in the body. Other vaccines can spoil if not kept cool, which can lead to distribution problems, therefore allowing an increase in the manufacturers’ ability to mass product doses and allow the body to potentially recognize new variants of the virus. Right now, we know of 16 HIV mutations.

Johnson & Johnson, another major producer of the coronavirus vaccine, does not use the mRNA technology.