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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

"The nanoparticle vaccine was tested in cell culture and in mice."

OK, progress, but not that far along yet.

There's a similar COVID vaccine, from Caltech and Oxford, in about the same stage of development.[1] Phase I testing in humans should start some time in the next year.

This is encouraging.

[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/e2-80-98all-in-one-...

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The amount of ‘HIV cures’ compared to drugs that actually hit the market are disproportionate. I don’t fully know what causes trials to fail but I would assume failure rate is pretty substantial, so I won’t hold my breath.

HIV is unusually difficult to target and mutates very rapidly. It also has the ability to intertwine itself with DNA in CD4 lymphocytes and then start reproducing after a long period of dormancy[1]. Other viruses don't do that.

[1] https://news.weill.cornell.edu/news/2020/04/hiv-hides-in-imm....

> Other viruses don't do that.

...yet

I mean other retro-viruses exist, but but only HIV and HTLV-1/2 make humans sick.

Is what HIV does with lymphocytes, similar to what herpes does with nerve cells?

No HSV works differently[1], it produces chemicals that surpasses the immune response.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herpes_simplex_virus#Immune_ev...

Do we know other viruses don't do that or just don't know of other viruses that do?

An HIV vaccine is really hard.[1] The human immune system is very poor at fighting HIV. People do not recover on their own. There is no had HIV, recovered, now immune state.

COVID and influenza are much easier, because the human immune system can fight off those viruses reasonably effectively and most people recover. A vaccine just has to replicate having had the disease and recovered.

Here's an article from The Lancet on the many COVID vaccines using this approach now in test.[2]

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-developing-hiv...

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8602808/

> COVID and influenza are much easier, because the human immune system can fight off those viruses reasonably effectively and most people recover. A vaccine just has to replicate having had the disease and recovered.

Really?

Influenza mutates and mostly escapes natural immunity all the time. Essentially everyone has had the flu and recovered, and a lot of people (and almost all children?) have been vaccinated. Yet the flu still circulates. The whole point of this new vaccine candidate is to produce better protection than natural immunity or the current vaccine.

COVID is so new that the endgame isn’t really known, but reinfections with different variants seem to be fairly common. Certainly the other (non-COVID) human coronaviruses reinfect humans regularly. (They account for 1/3 of common colds by estimates I’ve seen, and there are only four of them. The average person gets many more than 12 colds in their life.)

None of this is relevant. They were responding to a comment bringing up how many hiv vaccines appear and fail trial. The flu and covid are different from hiv in the way this comment describes.

> Influenza mutates and mostly escapes natural immunity all the time

You're right, it does, and the parent comment is also right that your immune system will fight it and win again most of the time.

HIV is special because your body will fight it, but lose the battle given enough time. The Human Immunodeficiency Virus targets your immune system, and gradually weakens it until you can't fight even common fungus spores.

COVID storms the gates and the soldiers fight it back, HIV sneaks into the castle and attacks the barracks in a war of attrition.

OK, we've inmiced the title above. Thanks!

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