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  • Hacker News
  • Jury is out until the overall health effect is shown to be positive
    by grokcodec
  • This follows a widely renounced successful treatment drug too right?
    by kylehotchkiss
  • Can anyone explain why the body doesn’t just naturally make lots of These broadly neutralising antibodies?

    It seems like they’d be so useful - so there must be a good reason there aren’t lots of them normally?

    by jonplackett
  • Because humans were designed by evolution, a process driven by random mutations and natural selection that can become stuck at local maxima rather than producing the best possible design.
    by bottle_roket
  • I am sure in some countries this vaccine will be made mandatory for all teenagers because the assumption is they will have unprotected sex, even if you're a loner.
    by alightsoul
  • Why did people downvote this? Virginia, Rhode Island, DC and Puerto Rico public schools all mandate the HPV vaccine for kids, regardless of sexual activity. Many people think it's a good idea and this may be a good idea also.
    by CGMthrowaway
  • The timeline of HIV/AIDS discovery to treatment to "cure" is fascinating to me

    I distinctly remember Reagan cabinet members openly joking about all the people dying from it in WhiteHouse press briefing (basically Trump before Trump prototypes)

    * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_HIV/AIDS

    Now if they could just do this for me-cfs/long-covid and related auto-immune diseases (there are over eighty) without the 50 year timeline please

    by ck2
  • I knew someone who claimed they had encountered AIDS as a doctor in late 1960s London. I don't know the truth of this, of course, and the person concerned has passed away. I do know that some illnesses present similarly, but it's not impossible. I am sure these diseases are around for a while before people identify them properly.
    by nephihaha
  • OK this sounds fantastic, but is it going to be another case of an expert dropping in on this thread and going "Ah, 100s of these come out every month. It's promising but nowhere near human trials yet."
    by short_sells_poo
  • We don't need an expert even - pre-clinical is a far ways off even if successful.

    This is in the "interesting advancement" stage, not "promising treatment."

    by ebiester
  • Tested on rhesus macaques. Worked well for 44% of them.

    It's a positive step, but still a fair way off for humans.

    by AndrewDucker
  • It doesn't need to be 100% effective in humans, it just needs to slow transmission enough such that the rate of incidence declines in the direction of eradication.
    by mohamedkoubaa
  • I have to admit that given how many times we have been here, I struggle with being excited about any news about a HIV vaccine until we see results from humans. Just way too many times of hope.

    That being said, I don't understand enough to parse this very buzzword heavy release. Is this fundamentally different than the every 6 month vaccine we have now and is a more traditional vaccine or is it just continuing on that trend?

    by nerdjon
  • Long-acting antiretroviral injection ≠ vaccine
    by noname120
  • The reason why this is a big deal is because they figured out a way to engineer the type of cells that are hard to create that can readily fight off the virus. In some people they create them already. Here they were able to get the body to create them.

    I agree it is far off from something in humans but it's a giant leap. The way I see it is like sending Laika in space before we send humans. It's significant and promising of a future where humans might have a vaccine.

    by xutopia
  • Phase I trials happening now. Godspeed to them. It’s where most HIV vaccines die
    by khalic
  • I invested in Moderna around the time they had their vaccine enter Phase I trials, hoping for a pay off.

    Paid off it did not.

    by cromka
  • The actual paper - never trust press releases from authors' institutions: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10837-5

    Peer review files: https://media.springernature.com/original/springer-static/es...

    Independent article covering it: https://cen.acs.org/pharmaceuticals/vaccines/hiv-vaccine-can...

    by croemer
  • While HIV vaccine research is an exciting field, it's worth pointing out that halting HIV transmission is, practically speaking, a solved problem with oral and injectable reverse transcriptase inhibitors. The ongoing loss of life and health due to HIV could be stopped if we cared enough to invest resources in wide-scale PrEP availability and public health education. Waiting for an HIV vaccine is the domain equivalent of hoping fusion power will solve our energy needs. Other solutions exist already; we just have to use them.
    by RGS1811
  • Transportation was a solved problem with horses, doesn't mean the car isn't a good idea. Same for internal combustion and EVs.

    A vaccine is an objectively better solution than PrEP, just because of the time scale, PrEP needs discipline on a daily or x-monthly basis. A vaccine could last for years. Although, realistically, it's more likely to end up requiring yearly updates like COVID, because HIV is also a mutating son of a bitch.

    I 100% agree that waiting for a vaccine is stupid beyond measure. The world should do both: make PrEP widely available AND keep funding vaccine research.

    by tonnydourado
  • prep is great but i would really rather take a one-time vaccine than be expected to take an expensive pill forever that could mess up my liver
    by evilfred
  • Isn’t prep more like a prophylactic, as opposed to a a vaccine?

    I’m more familiar with malaria, where the preventative medicines are currently more effective than the vaccines.

    by greggsy
  • This is the wrong take. You are basically arguing that if we have one solution, why bother having a second one?
    by niceguy1827
  • It is endemic in the simian population. It will keep crossing over into humans again and again. It has done it before several times. People who live near forests would have to be on Prep everyday of their lives. The reason they eat bushmeat is the because they are poor and will be too poor to afford daily medication. A once-and-done vaccine would at least stop new crossovers. Only then could we really get a handle on ending this disease world-wide.
    by fhdkweig
  • Cost and compliance are still 2 major factors that have not been solved.

    We also have education and stigma. While within the LGBT community it is far more common to be open about status and taking prep and doxy (far from perfect though), it still feels like outside of that the conversations are not happening as much as they should.

    Throw in doctors that are not being proactive about the conversation.

    Right now it seems like having prep and doxy is largely considered only if you are engaged in "risky" behavior (not saying that in a judgmental way to be clear), instead of just being sexually active and protecting yourself. Money and investment alone won't fix that, that is a societal shift around how we talk about sex.

    That is also before we get into the cost issues in many other countries just for those that do need it.

    by nerdjon
  • It's a solved problem if you are someone that knows you'll be exposed to HIV in the very near future and you have the money and wherewithal to purchase PrEP before that event (and you can plan the event 7 days out).

    The power of a vaccine is you can give it to adults and kids before they are sexually active and protect them, potentially, for the rest of their lives.

    I'd also be curious to know if the combination of ART + the vaccine might cure someone of HIV. Which is also a pretty big deal.

    by cogman10
  • You could say the same about teen pregnancy being a practically solved problem, except there is still the problem of teen pregnancy. Or even something more mundane as driving consistently safely all the time to solve the problem of accidents.

    If everyone was disciplined all the time in regard to everything, many problems in the world would simply not exist. But we live in reality where for whatever reason, people don't know to do something, or they do know and they're just not disciplined, or they make a mistake due to extenuating circumstances. And I would expect that the vast majority of people would oppose any idea of somehow punitively "dealing with" people who get some things wrong.

    So I would say that it's very evidently not a practically solved problem, because if it were we wouldn't be looking to solve it still.

    Within this reality, a vaccine is a great additional tool at solving the problem of preventing the spread of HIV.

    by jonathanlydall
  • The most interesting point of the article for me is that this vaccine appears to be a series of shots which act as a curriculum for the immune system. Each one slightly different and targeting a different stage of B-cell development. I've never thought of vaccine series working like that, so it was a new and impressive idea.
    by iandanforth
  • All vaccines are training data for the immune system, which is a learning machine whose operation is a little bit like a genetic algorithm. It generates and sieves variation using a vocabulary of pre-encoded building blocks to fit the targets it's presented with.

    It's an incredible system, and a product of probably a billion years of evolution since the first multicellular organisms had to protect themselves from infection.

    by api
  • I do not see what is impressive here at all. The immune system constantly yields new antibodies targeting different epitopes - all the time. THAT is what is impressive, not multi-vaccines trying to induce shifts towards certain epitopes over others.
    by shevy-java