Covid-19 vaccines open up new perspectives for researchers

Sidaction launched its weekend of mobilization on Friday March 26 to collect donations and raise awareness of the fight against HIV. To date, there is still no vaccine against this virus. In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, a question then arises: why did researchers find a vaccine against Covid-19 and not against HIV? To understand this, we have to look at the proteins on the surface of these viruses, to analyze how they try to escape our immune defenses. “The AIDS virus mutates so much that a strategy is really difficult to find”, explains Professor Raphaël Terreur, biochemist pharmacist in 3D modeling.

Will the first effective technology against Covid-19 be against AIDS? Messenger RNA requires a small machine capable of producing these vaccines, the principle of which is to make our cells manufacture the weapons against infection. “We’ve been working on it for a long time, about six, seven years, and initially, we started with an approach to make carp vaccines”, explains Doctor Bernard Verrier, research director at the CNRS. “We will be able to test very far-fetched, very innovative hypotheses that we could not test before. And in addition, we will have funding because no one believed it”, he continues. The Covid-19 seems to have changed the situation.