Spanish group takes part in ambitious AIDS research project
Spanish pharmaceutical group ESTEVE has signed a partnership agreement with IrsiCaixa AIDS Research Institute, allowing it to join a major research project to develop a vaccine for HIV.
Spanish pharmaceutical group ESTEVE has signed a partnership agreement with IrsiCaixa AIDS Research Institute, allowing it to join a major research project to develop a vaccine for HIV.
The initiative, thought to be the first of its kind in Spain, involves two prestigious AIDS research centres: the IrsiCaixa AIDS Research Institute, located at Germans Trias i Pujol Hospital, and AIDS & Infectious Diseases Research Centre at Barcelona's Clinic Hospital.
ESTEVE's involvement in the research process will start soon as vaccine trial phase has been reached, taking care of the post-trial development up until its commercialisation. The agreement is to be a pioneering partnership in this field between authorities, researchers, companies and banks.
The HIVACAT (Catalan Centre for HIV vaccine) Project for AIDS Research and Development focuses on "developing new vaccines that work in two different ways, therefore producing two types of immunological solutions. Firstly by generating antibodies that block and prevent the virus, and secondly by generating what's known as a cellular the cytotoxic solution, where certain cells of the immune system recognise HIV infected cells and get rid of them", explained Dr Bonaventura Clotet, general director of AIDS Research Institute IrsiCaixa and head of the HIV unit at the Germans Trias i Pujol Hospital in Badalona, and Dr Jose M. Gatell, general director of the AIDS & Infectious Diseases Department at the Clinic Hospital in Barcelona.
HIVACAT is currently looking for individual safety and effectiveness aspects of several viral components purified in the lab that allow neutralising antibodies and cytoxic solution to be activated. Once the elements that stimulate a suitable level of immunity, to generate each one of these solutions, have been identified they can be combined in such a way so the join effect gives a certain level of protection against HIV.
"With ESTEVE's involvement and commitment to the HIVACAT research project, it will be able to gain speed and efficiency in the development of new treatments and assure once research results have been obtained they are quickly developed up to the production stage of the new HIV vaccine," said Antoni Esteve, ESTEVE's general director.