A new AIDS vaccine is about to be tested in the USA, one developed by Robert Gallo, the scientist who first proved that HIV caused AIDS. These will induce the production of antibodies that will fight against HIV virus before it changes the function of the T-cells.

The vaccine has been in development for a few15 years, but Gallo says that's because his team has been very thorough in vetting the vaccine in animal testing, and because getting funding to entering into human testing has been hard. This testing has been earlier conducted in monkeys with positive results. "As the HIV-swarm had trouble to actually skirt the majority of these heady earlier anti-bodies, it toggled by many mutations in a carpet surface healthy proteins".

These findings provide insights for the design of vaccines that can "kick-start" and then shape the maturation of broadly neutralizing antibodies in HIV uninfected individuals, to provide protection from HIV exposure.

As reported in the news release of Science, gp120 first attaches to the CD4 receptor on T-cells and modifies its conformation so that the hidden parts of the virus will be exposed. Once HIV is attached to both these T-cell receptors, it can successfully infect the immune cell.

The candidate immunogenic, Full-Length Single Chain, is created toelicit strongly protective antibody responses across the spectrum of HIV-1 strains. That goal is to trigger antibodies against gp120 when it's already attached to CD4 and is in its vulnerable transitional state, effectively stopping it from attaching to the second CCR5 attachment.

The vaccine development team is being led by George Lewis with IHV, and includes Antonio DeVico and Timothy Fouts. The human trial has taken a long time to research and develop, as all vaccine trials do, since the institute wants to be absolutely sure of its potential efficacy before proceeding to human trials. We wanted more and more answers before going to people.

According to the World Health Organization, AIDS-related diseases killed 1.2 million people in 2014.

Let's hope that caution pays off, and we may finally have a viable contender for an AIDS vaccine on our hands.