Scientists say they developed a vaccine that temporarily hinders HIV

           
Spanish researchers announced that they have developed a vaccine that can temporarily hinder the growth of the HIV virus in infected patients, the AFP reported.             

36 people carrying the virus were tested with the vaccine based on immune called exposed to HIV that had been inactivated with heat, yielding the best recorded results for such a treatment.             

"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.                 

The therapeutic vaccine, a shot that treats an existing disease rather than preventing it, was safe and led to a dramatic drop in the amount of HIV virus detected in some patients, said the study, published Wednesday in Science Translation Medicine.           

After 12 weeks of the trial, the HIV viral load dropped by more than 90 percent among 12 of the 22 patients who received the vaccine. Only one among the 11 patients who received a control injection without the vaccine experienced a similar result.              

After 24 weeks, the effectiveness had begun to decline, however, with seven of the 20 remaining patients receiving the vaccine enjoying a similar 90-percent slump in viral load. No-one in the control group of 10 patients experienced such a decline in the virus.             

The vaccine allowed patients temporarily to live without taking multiple medicines on a daily basis, which created hardship for patients, could have toxic side-effects over the long term and had a high financial price, the team said.                 

However the vaccine lost its effectiveness after a year, when the patients had to return to their regular combination therapy of anti-retroviral drugs.               

According to latest U.N. figures, the number of people infected by HIV worldwide rose to 34 million in 2011 from 33.5 million in 2010.