An HIV vaccine has failed in late-stage trials, researchers said Wednesday, adding to a decade-long list of failed attempts to control the global epidemic.
The study, known as Mosaico, was the result of a public-private partnership involving the US government and pharmaceutical giant Janssen. Since 2019, it operates in eight Western countries, including the United States. About 3,900 gay men and transgender people who are at significant risk of HIV were enrolled in the study.
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Mosaico's lack of efficacy was not unexpected the experts said, recently another clinical trial called Imbokodo, announced in August 2021, failed to test a similar vaccine in African women. According to an agency spokesperson, the NIAID spent $56 million between the two trials.
According to the National Institutes of Health, the vaccines tested in both studies used common cold viruses to deliver so-called mosaic immunogens. This should induce a robust and protective immune response by including genetic material from a variety of HIV strains common worldwide. Mosaico contained additional elements to boost immune response.
"We expected to see some signal of efficacy from this vaccine," Susan Backbinder, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who co-led the Mosaico study, said.
Backbinder said it was too early to determine the reason for Mosaico's vaccine failure. Her team plans to analyze blood samples from participants over the next few months to investigate this. They will also try to determine if there were any subgroups of participants for whom the vaccine showed efficacy, and it is hoped that the findings will help her develop an HIV vaccine in the future.
