Yellow fever
HIV: As Scientists Inch Closer To A Vaccine, Cuts To Funding Could Stall Progress
The Trump administration's plan to cut funding for HIV vaccine research comes at a time when the field is making progress. Victor Torres/Stocksy UnitedThe Trump administration reportedly plans to cut almost all funding for HIV vaccine research.
Experts say the decision comes at a time when research in this field is making substantial progress.
Many effective treatments are available for HIV, but these are lifelong commitments that manage a chronic disease rather than cure it.
Treatments for HIV infection have come a long way since the 1980s, when too many lives were lost during the epidemic.
Today, antiretroviral therapies and other treatments allow people with HIV to live longer lives and, in many cases, prevent the transmission of the virus that causes the disease to other people.
Scientists now say the next step in the fight is a vaccine that protects against HIV.
However, that next development could be on the chopping block.
Trump administration officials reportedly plan to halt funding for a wide array of HIV vaccine research.
Researchers told CBS News they have been informed by officials at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has instructed the agency not to issue any more funding during the next fiscal year for HIV vaccine research.
NIH officials said HHS officials have instead decided to "go with currently available approaches to eliminate HIV."
The decision will close down HIV vaccine research projects at the Duke Human Vaccine Institute and the Scripps Research Institute, according to a report in the journal Science.
Officials at Moderna also told CBS News that their current clinical trials on HIV vaccines have been put on hold.
Experts say the decision to cut funding for an HIV vaccine is short-sighted and reckless.
"I'm stunned by this decision," said Jake Scott, MD, a clinical associate professor of medicine at Stanford University in California who specializes in infectious diseases.
"There is no scientific or medical evidence to justify these cuts at the exact moment this field is showing real promise," he told Healthline.
Carl Baloney Jr., the chief executive officer-elect of AIDS United, agreed.
"Eliminating funding for HIV vaccine research undermines decades of scientific progress and turns our back on a future where HIV could be preventable for all, regardless of where someone lives, their income, or access to healthcare," he told Healthline.
Why an HIV vaccine is importantExperts say that treatments for HIV are incredibly effective.
However, they note that most involve daily adherence and aren't necessarily readily available or affordable for many people.
"There are a lot of good options, but they can be really expensive," Scott said. "These medications are also not a cure. They are a lifetime burden."
The experts add that people with low levels of HIV in their system can still have weakened immune systems. That can raise the risk of serious infections as well as inflammation that can lead to conditions such as heart disease.
"A vaccine can help prevent all this," said Scott.
Experts note that a vaccine research program may be difficult to put back together even if a new administration restored funding in the near future.
They say it took decades to build these programs and restarting them would take time. In addition, researchers will leave the field of HIV prevention to set up shop in another industry that is receiving funding.
"We could lose an entire generation of scientists," said Scott. "This is setting the field back a decade or more at a critical time."
"This isn't just about canceling [a] clinical trial. It's about sidelining the scientists, institutions, and community partners driving innovation forward," added Baloney. "These setbacks could delay the development of a successful HIV vaccine by years or even decades."
How scientists fought against HIVThe first treatment for HIV was approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1987.
Azidothymidine (AZT) was first developed in 1964 as a treatment for cancer. It was ineffective in that usage, but in the 1980s, scientists discovered AZT could suppress HIV replication without damaging healthy cells. It helped treat people with AIDS as well as people who were HIV positive but had no symptoms.
In the 1990s, other nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NRTIs) were developed and approved. Laboratory tests to measure viral load and cell counts accelerated this research.
From there, scientists experimented with combining drugs to help counter the HIV virus's ability to mutate and replicate. In 1996, a triple-drug therapy proved effective in thwarting HIV replication and creating a barrier against drug resistance.
Since then, these antiretroviral drugs have become more effective and more available.
The effectiveness of these medications is nothing short of miraculous.
In the 1980s, the average life expectancy after an AIDS diagnosis was one year. Today, people who adhere to combination antiretroviral drug therapies can expect to live a near-normal life span.
In some cases, the medications can reduce the HIV viral load in a person to the point where the virus is undetectable and can't be transmitted to another person.
How is HIV treated today?More than 50 types of HIV medications are now approved for use. Some of the more commonly used antiretroviral medications are:
Combination NRTI drugs that include Truvada and Descovy. These medications work by preventing HIV from converting its RNA into DNA. This prevents the virus from making copies of itself..
Integrase strand transfer inhibitors (INSTIs) that include Vocabria and Biktarvy. These drugs work by blocking an enzyme that HIV uses to put HIV DNA into human DNA inside cells.
Protease inhibitors (PIs) such as Lexiva and Crixivan. These medications work by blocking an enzyme that HIV needs as part of its life cycle.
Non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NNRTIs) that include Intelence and Viramune. These drugs work by preventing the HIV virus from making copies of itself.
Entry inhibitors such as Fuzeon and Selzentry. These medications work by blocking HIV from entering CD4 T cells.
In addition, there are drugs known as Cytochrome P4503A (CYP3A) inhibitors, such as Tybost and Norvir, that help boost the levels of HIV medications in the bloodstream.
There are also medications known as post-attachment inhibitors that when used with antiretroviral drugs can help prevent HIV from entering immune cells. Trogarzo was the first of these drugs to become available, having been approved in 2018.
In addition, there are attachment inhibitor medications, a newer form of HIV drug that works by attaching to a viral protein, which prevents that protein from entering healthy T cells. Only one type of this medication, Rubokia, is currently available, having been approved in 2020.
Most people with HIV are given medications, but there also are long-acting injections that are given once a month or once every other month.
Scott said these treatments are cures that have turned HIV into a "managed chronic disease" to the point where he and other colleagues now refer to AIDS as "advanced HIV."
Baloney said, however, there are limits to how much treatments can do.
"Current treatments and prevention tools have transformed HIV into a manageable chronic condition, but they are not a cure and they're not accessible to everyone," he said. "An HIV vaccine would be a game-changer, especially for communities facing systemic barriers to care."
Preventive measures for HIVEven with the available treatments, experts agree that it's better for a person if they don't contract HIV in the first place.
They say condom use, along with dental dams and gloves, can be effective barriers to contracting HIV.
Limiting sexual partners is also recommended, as are sterile needles for intravenous drug users.
Getting tested for HIV is also an important component. It's estimated that more than 1 million people in the United States have HIV, and 13% of them don't know they have contracted the virus.
There are medications available that can be taken as a precaution or after potential exposure to HIV. These drugs include:
Preexposure prophylaxis (PrEP): These medications can be taken as a daily pill or a bimonthly injection. The first injectable PrEP drug was Apretude, which was approved by the FDA in 2021. Truvada can also be used as PrEP therapy. These medications help prevent HIV from getting a foothold in the body.
Postexposure prophylaxis (PEP) drugs: These are designed to be taken within 72 hours of potential exposure to HIV. It is a pill ingested once a day for 28 days.
Lenacapavir: This injectable drug has been tested in clinical trials as a potential PrEP therapy. The FDA is scheduled to vote on its approval on June 19.
Experts say all these preventive measures are good practices, but they note that vaccines are still the most effective.
"None of these replace the potential power of a preventive vaccine, especially in communities where stigma, criminalization, and health disparities limit the reach of existing tools," Baloney said.
View the original article on Healthline
A Promising New HIV Vaccine Was Set To Start Trials. Then Came Trump's Latest Cuts
A vaccine pharmacist prepares samples as part of an HIV vaccine trial on March 16, 2022 in Masaka, Uganda. The vaccine in that trial did not prove effective. A promising vaccine development program funded by the National Institutes of Health was just informed by the Trump administration that its support will end next year. Luke Dray/Getty Images hide caption
toggle caption Luke Dray/Getty ImagesFor nearly 15 years, Dennis Burton worked on a project aimed at solving what he calls "one of the most difficult problems in biomedicine" — creating an HIV vaccine.
That work was funded by the largest National Institutes of Health-funded program devoted to such research, with a seven-year grant totaling $258 million, and is considered one of the leading vaccine efforts. On May 30, he learned that work will end. In a video call, NIH officials told him that the Trump administration was terminating the program next year.
"It's just devastating. So much human toil has gone into this," says the Scripps Research Institute immunologist. "Just when it looked like we could beat this virus, we're going to give up."
Sponsor MessageDesigning an effective HIV vaccine has proven immensely challenging for researchers, who've spent decades working to figure out how to prompt the immune system to protect against this wily virus, says Burton.
One of the reasons it's so difficult is because the HIV virus evolves faster than any other known virus. Even within an infected individual, the virus can splinter off into many new variants, effectively dodging the immune system's first-responders — antibodies.
Burton and his colleagues at the Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Development — a consortia of researchers at Scripps and Duke University known as CHAVD — have been working on a promising approach aimed at coaxing the immune system to make "broadly neutralizing antibodies" capable of attacking many forms of the virus. Clinical trials were slated to start as soon as next year. Without funding, they won't proceed.
"Complex and duplicative health programs have resulted in serious duplication of efforts that dilute taxpayer resources," a Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson told NPR in response to a question about the rationale behind the cuts.
The news of the termination comes as the HIV vaccine has largely coalesced around the idea that broadly neutralizing antibodies are central to an effective HIV vaccine, says Mark Feinberg, president and CEO of IAVI, a non-profit that develops vaccines. Scripps and Duke researchers were pursuing different approaches toward that shared goal, which is good, he says. "You don't know which is going to work and whether there's potential synergies between the two approaches."
The Trump administration's termination of CHAVD is just the latest in a string of cuts and cancellations of HIV-vaccine related grants, from clinical trials to basic laboratory research. In 2022, the U.S. Accounted for nearly 90% of the $731 million devoted to HIV vaccine research globally. If those funds dry up, many researchers fear that the prospects of getting an effective HIV vaccine will dwindle.
"After many years of frustration and negative results we now believe that there is a pathway to develop an efficacious HIV vaccine," says Feinberg. "It's really disappointing at this time to have the foundation kicked out from underneath you."
A canceled African trialThe NIH-funded project isn't the only vaccine research being affected by the Trump administration.
In late January, biomedical scientist Linda-Gail Bekker and her colleagues were gathered in Tanzania to discuss their efforts to develop and test HIV vaccines across eight African countries. That team, called The BRILLIANT HIV vaccine consortium had won a five-year $45 million dollar grant from USAID in 2023 and was days away from starting its first clinical trial in humans when it got a stop-work order from the U.S. Government.
"To say we were disappointed is to completely underplay how we felt," said Bekker, of the University of Cape Town. "We felt desperate, that something we'd been working so hard to accomplish was removed without a good reason."
Bekker and her colleagues had spent a year assembling a team of research biologists and clinicians from around the world to develop immunogens — substances that kick start an immune response that serve as the basis for future vaccines. They looked for inspiration, in part, from HIV patients in South Africa whose bodies seem to naturally produce broadly neutralizing antibodies.
"The idea was to base [vaccines] on [HIV] viruses that had been discovered in Africa and immunogens designed based on those viruses as templates," she said. Underscoring the global nature of HIV vaccine research, scientists with the CHAVD program helped design some of the immunogens, Bekker says.
Sponsor MessageThen, the team would "put these immunogens into humans, in clinical trials, to test whether we can actually move the human immune system to make broadly neutralizing antibodies," says Bekker. Those clinical trials were slated to happen in African countries where the HIV epidemic is most severe, allowing researchers to more clearly assess whether the vaccines work than if they were to test them in, say, the U.S.
Now, Bekker and her colleagues have largely stopped vaccine-related work and are instead scrambling to find alternative funds for the project.
The USAID grant is "irreplaceable" in terms of its scope, says Bekker. The team is now figuring out how to scale back their ambitions by running fewer, smaller clinical trials. But that means the data will be less valuable, says Bekker.
These kinds of international collaborations are commonplace in efforts to develop and test HIV vaccines, researchers told NPR — and face an uncertain future under the Trump administration.
In May, NIH announced it would no longer fund foreign "subawards," which allow U.S. Scientists to pay foreign collaborators to conduct research overseas. Last year, NIH funded more than 3,600 such awards. Instead, foreign researchers must apply directly to NIH for funding, a barrier that will likely reduce foreign collaboration, says Susan Zolla-Pazner, a microbiologist at the Ichan School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
"Foreign partners in HIV research are extremely important," she says. "It's a global disease and viruses don't recognize national boundaries." For example, if a researcher wanted to study how to prevent babies from being infected by their HIV-positive mothers, the best thing to do is conduct the study in a place where such mothers exist in sufficient numbers, which is outside of the U.S. Says Zolla-Pazner. If you can't do that, "it's more than a hurdle. It's a brick wall in terms of being able to understand how to protect a population of women and their children."
Sponsor MessageOn top of these restrictions, researchers worry generally about the prospect of getting vaccine-related grants accepted in the current climate. NIH has already cancelled or delayed payments on over 2,500 individual grants, including some related to HIV vaccine research, and under the Trump administration has signaled a shift away from mRNA vaccine research — the same platform that allowed rapid development of the first COVID-19 vaccines.
Pessimism — and yet hopeAltogether, the administration's actions — and pledges to cut funding for NIH grants by more than 40% next year — have many researchers pessimistic about the prospects of developing an HIV vaccine anytime soon.
"My personal view is that advances will stall out," says Burton, the Scripps scientist. "The United States led the world in HIV vaccine research, I don't think that anyone's going to step into the breach," he says. "Philanthropy can certainly help, but they're unlikely to step in with the magnitude of funding needed."
Even if funding eventually comes back, from the U.S. Or elsewhere, it can be difficult for research groups to bounce back from extended cuts.
"It is putting a period in the middle of a sentence," says Zolla-Pazner. "You cannot reconstitute that group, even two months later, because people have lost their jobs."
Other researchers are hopeful the field will eventually build on the progress already made to deliver an HIV vaccine.
"It remains a huge challenge, but we now have little chinks of light of how to move this field forward," says Bekker. "I believe we will get back on track, but we will have lost time," she says. "And that means people's lives."
Have information you want to share about the ongoing changes at federal science agencies and their effects on research? Reach out to Jonathan Lambert via encrypted communications on Signal: @jonlambert.12
Cuts To HIV Vaccine Research Come Amid Challenges To Other Vaccines, Treatment
The Trump administration has ended a program seeking a vaccine for HIV, the first in a series of decisions that is leaving vaccine research and expertise behind.
In a move that continues the Trump administration's opposition to HIV research and prevention, it was announced they would be terminating HIV vaccine studies primarily affecting the Duke Human Vaccine Institute, the Scripps Research Institute, Moderna's clinical trials through the HIV Vaccines Trial Network.1 These decisions come at a time when HIV treatment and prevention efforts and vaccine research have come under fire from the administration.
Programs looking for an HIV vaccine were discontinued at the end of May, continuing a trend of cutting back on HIV and vaccine research.Image credit: weyo - stock.Adobe.Com
Treatment and prevention of HIV has been a sticking point for the Trump administration, coming under fire soon after the inauguration. The administration has made several cuts to the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief,2 rid the CDC of the Division of HIV Prevention,3 and cut money for several studies related to HIV in March.4 These actions have put HIV research, prevention, and treatment in a dangerous position, with the potential for these cuts to leave many without improved methods of addressing HIV.
The announcement of the plans to cut the HIV vaccine program is another blow to HIV research nationwide. The cuts total $258 million dedicated to a program that did research into a potential vaccine,5 with advisement to the NIH to not approve any future studies on an HIV vaccine.1 The Trump administration is also seeking to change budgetary rules so that upfront costs of HIV vaccines would be accounted for in 1 year as opposed to multiple years, making it harder for these studies to be approved.
Vaccines, in general, have been a subject of dispute in the Trump administration, with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, removing all members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices on June 9,6 continuing a trend of vaccine skepticism from the HHS secretary. Between these decisions, it is unclear how vaccines and vaccine development will evolve in the future and how these decisions will affect HIV vaccine research overall.
The Trump administration claims it will be focusing their efforts on currently available approaches to eliminating HIV, and that all critical programs related to HIV/AIDS will continue under the Administration for a Healthy America (AHA), which is the agency proposed by Kennedy as part of his overall health plan in America.1 The HHS budget proposal released on June 10 indicates that the budget for AHA will be partially derived from redirected CDC funds, with the CDC taking a $5 billion cut.7 This includes consolidating HIV/AIDS prevention and research that would cut $794 million for prevention and $1 billion to HIV/AIDS overall vs the 2024 fiscal year.
This move also comes as experts in HIV await the approval of lenacapavir, which has been shown to be near 100% effective in preventing HIV in the PURPOSE 2 trial (NCT04925752).8 It is unknown how the twice-yearly injection will be introduced to vulnerable populations in the US given the cuts to the vaccine and prevention programs should the FDA give the green light to the treatment on the planned decision date of June 19.
The decisions made by the Trump administration regarding funding for HIV vaccines and prevention threaten the ability to end the HIV epidemic going forward. Even as new research is being done to find new means of preventing HIV, a cure for the virus still is the goal to ending the epidemic. This decision could be a big step back in not only domestic solutions but global solutions for a cure to HIV, as well as reducing the incidence of the virus throughout the globe.
References
1. Gounder C, Tin A. Trump administration ending multiple HIV vaccine studies, scientists and officials say. CBS News. May 30, 2025. Accessed June 11, 2025. Https://www.Cbsnews.Com/news/trump-administration-ending-multiple-hiv-vaccine-studies/
2. Bonavitacola J. Cuts to PEPFAR spell detrimental HIV outcomes in South Africa. AJMC®. February 13, 2025. Accessed June 11, 2025. Https://www.Ajmc.Com/view/cuts-to-pepfar-spell-detrimental-hiv-outcomes-in-south-africa
3. Bonavitacola J. Elimination of HIV prevention could have consequences for HIV response. AJMC. March 25, 2025. Accessed June 11, 2025. Https://www.Ajmc.Com/view/elimination-of-division-of-hiv-prevention-could-have-consequences-for-hiv-response
4. Nirappil F. Deep cuts to HIV research could halt decades of progress, scientists say. The Washington Post. April 4, 2025. Accessed June 11, 2025. Https://www.Washingtonpost.Com/health/2025/04/04/hiv-trump-cuts-prep/
5. Mandavilli A.Trump administration ends program critical to search for an H.I.V. Vaccine. The New York Times. May 30, 2025. Accessed June 11, 2025. Https://www.Nytimes.Com/2025/05/30/health/trump-hiv-cuts.Html
6. Grossi G. RFK Jr sweeps clean CDC vaccine advisory panel, aiming to bolster public confidence. AJMC. June 9, 2025. Accessed June 11, 2025. Https://www.Ajmc.Com/view/rfk-jr-sweeps-clean-cdc-vaccine-advisory-panel-aiming-to-bolster-public-confidence
7. Gold R, Ingram J. HHS budget proposal eliminates CDC's chronic disease, global health centers in favor of new "MAHA" agency. CBS News. June 10, 2025. Accessed June 11, 2025. Https://www.Cbsnews.Com/news/hhs-budget-proposal-cdc-chronic-disease-global-health-maha-agency/
8. Kelley CF, Acevedo-Quiñones M, Agwu AL, et al. Twice-yearly lenacapavir for HIV prevention in men and gender-diverse persons. N Engl J Med. 2025;392(13):1261-1276. Doi:10.1056/NEJMoa2411858
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