New Vaccine Slows Progress of HIV

Viral load dropped by more than 90 percent in almost half of patients who received the vaccine

A TEAM of Spanish researchers say they have developed a therapeutic vaccine that can temporarily brake growth of the HIV virus in infected patients.

The vaccine, based on immune cells exposed to HIV that had been inactivated with heat, was tested on a group of 36 people carrying the virus and the results were the best yet recorded for such a treatment, the team said.

"What we did was give instructions to the immune system so it could learn to destroy the virus, which it does not do naturally," said Felipe Garcia, one of the scientists in the team at Barcelona University's Hospital Clinic.