HIV Vaccine Success in Monkeys, Victory Clouded by Unethical Animal Testing

Could a cure for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) be just around the corner? It looks promising, since scientists have created a vaccine for monkeys that removed and fought off an HIV-like virus from the bloodstream of affected animals, according to CBS news. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that there are 1.1 million people living with HIV in the United States today. These advancements could provide hope for a cure, but, sadly, at the cost of the monkeys the vaccine was tested on.

HIV is the virus that can lead to acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) and is a virus that the body cannot get rid of, says the CDC. T cells are specific cells of the immune system that fight off infections and diseases, and they are the cells that HIV specifically targets. If enough T cells are destroyed by the virus, the body can no longer fight off illnesses because the immune system fails. According to the CDC, it is possible that HIV arose when humans hunted and came in contact with the blood of chimpanzees in Africa. These chimpanzees are thought to have had simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) which mutated into HIV in the human body. “Studies show that HIV may have jumped from apes to humans as far back as the late 1800s,” the CDC says, and is known to have been in the United States since at least the mid-1970s.

In the past, there have been only a handful of known cases of HIV being cured, and they all occurred in bizarre circumstances. Louis Picker, one of the study researchers at Oregon Health and Science University, said, “To date, HIV infection has only been cured in a very small number of highly-publicized but unusual clinical cases in which HIV-infected individuals were treated with antiviral medicines very early after the onset of infection or received a stem cell transplant to combat cancer,” according to The San Francisco Chronicle. In the latter case, the stem cells were obtained from someone who is of the one percent of Caucasians that are immune to HIV, according to CBS News, and the transplant was originally used to fight the patient’s Leukemia. “This latest research suggests that certain immune responses elicited by a new vaccine may also have the ability to completely remove HIV from the body,” Picker said.

In the study, scientists inoculated 16 rhesus macaque monkeys with a vaccine and then they were infected with SIVmac239. This is a simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) which is 100 times more deadly than HIV, and of which individuals will likely die within two years, according to CBS News. The vaccine called the cytomegalovirus (CMV) given to the monkeys was modified by researchers to hopefully target the strain of SIV, instead of what it would normally do which is spread throughout the body in general. In nine out of 16 monkeys, the immune system fought off infection and destroyed the virus as reported by CBS News. The monkeys that had a successful reaction to CMV remain clear of SIV currently up to three years after the injection. According to The Independent, Picker told BBC, “It’s always tough to claim eradication – there could always be a cell which we didn’t analyze that has the virus in it. But for the most part, with very stringent criteria… there was no virus left in the body of these monkeys.” Because of this success, what was previously thought to be a permanent disease could now have the hope of finding a cure.

The animal lover and the scientist within me are having an ethical tug of war with this study, and it’s hard to know which side is winning. I support the efforts to find a cure for HIV that affects millions of people around the world, but it’s difficult for me to support animal testing of any kind. In some labs, it can be said that primates and other animals are treated similarly to how prisoners were treated in concentration camps in World War II. PETA shows on their website that in a typical animal research lab primates are often kept in cold metal cages, have no interaction with other organisms, go through pharmaceutical tests, invasive brain experiments and vaccine tests. This experiment clearly used vaccine tests on the animals, but the other conditions of the lab are unknown.

However, I do understand the need for a living subject. Because of the everchanging matter of SIV, this experiment would be difficult if not impossible to do in a lab without a live individual. The vaccine can be created in a lab, but to see it in action it is necessary to put it in a living being to observe the reaction in real-time. It is said that sometimes the ends justify the means, but to decide if that is true in a situation like this is nearly impossible for me.

Is the possibility of curing millions of people of this disease worth the treatment that these animals are subjected to? I think every life, whether it is human or animal, is important. But to declare that hundreds of millions of HIV infected human lives being improved by the unwilling sacrifice of a few dozen animals is a great payoff is still not easy for me to do. Since this study can provide substantial support for creating a future vaccine of HIV in humans, I can lean towards the supporting side, but would I have felt this way if the study provided no substantial results? I would then lean more in favor of the animals, but I can also understand that that is what research is; you cannot predict the outcome or else there would be no point in testing it. The researchers are now going to use these results to work towards creating an HIV vaccine, and Picker says they could possibly begin human trials within two years if they get approved, according to The Independent.

I believe I can simultaneously be grateful for the results of the study and not be completely all right with the study itself. Since this is all for the betterment of human life I think humans should be the subjects and not innocent animals, but in the world we live in today that is not likely to happen when the consequences could be less than ideal. Regardless, this experiment provided great insight for the human race in its endeavors to eradicate HIV.

Avery Twible can be reached at avery.twible@spartans.ut.edu