U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) has announced that they will be conducting a major trial of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) vaccine in South Africa under its new study called HVTN 702.

An experimental acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) vaccine that has worked better than anything else tried so far will be tested in South Africa. The scientists have tweaked the vaccine, which prevented infection by just about a third, and hope it will work better in this trial.

Like Us on Facebook

The HVTN 702 vaccine regimen consists of two experimental vaccines: a canarypox-based vaccine called ALVAC-HIV and a bivalent gp120 protein subunit vaccine with an adjuvant that enhances the body's immune response to the vaccine.

The trial is set to launch in November 15 sites in South Africa. It is designed to find out whether the vaccine is safe, tolerable and effective to prevent HIV infection among South African adults.

The experimental vaccine being tested in based on a U.S. military vaccine called RV144 that protected 31 percent of volunteers in Thailand in 2009. But the scientists have tweaked the vaccine to increase the magnitude and duration of vaccine-elicited immune responses, and hope it will work better in this trial.

“For the first time in seven years, the scientific community is embarking on a large-scale clinical trial of an HIV vaccine, the product of years of study and experimentation,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which is part of the National Institutes of Health and a co-funder of the trial.

The trial will include 5,400 men and women, aged from 18 to 35 and from groups deemed at-risk of HIV infection. All study participants will receive a total of five injections for more than one year and they will be randomly assigned to receive either the investigational vaccine regimen or a placebo.

Led by Glenda Gray, president and chief executive officer of the South African Medical Research Council, results of the trial are expected in late 2020.

TagsHIV, AIDS, South Africa, HIV Vaccine, HIV Vaccine in South Africa, HIV Vaccine trial