While significant progress has been made in HIV vaccine research, according to Penn State Professor Dipanjan Pan, there is currently no approved vaccine for HIV. Research is ongoing, though, he said, with multiple preventive and therapeutic strategies under investigation — but some vaccine candidates can cause participants to falsely test HIV-positive, complicating diagnosis and clinical management.
To solve this issue, Pan and his team developed a new approach capable of differentiating active HIV infection from false positives — which could potentially accelerate vaccine development and testing, Pan said. The researchers partnered with the HIV Vaccine Trials Network, which is sponsored by the National Institutes of Health’s Vaccine Research Center, to test 104 human blood samples with their new device. The device, which employs a combination of analyses to produce results in just five minutes, correctly identified those with active HIV-1 infection 95% of the time and those without active infection but with vaccine-induced molecules that could trigger a false positive, 98% of the time. That’s on par or better than every current approach, Pan said.
The researchers published their work, for which they have also filed a patent, in Science Advances.
Read the full news story here.
Source : The Pennsylvania State University
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