LONDON: Two teams of scientists are set to begin trials of HIV vaccines based on technologies used to develop COVID-19 jabs.
Oxford University’s Jenner Institute, which was behind the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, and US pharmaceutical giant Moderna in partnership with Scripps Research, will use different techniques.
The Oxford team’s HIV vaccine utilizes a modified adenovirus taken from chimpanzees, while the Moderna one is based on messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA).
Both methods have been used successfully to stimulate the human immune system against COVID-19 in the past year.
It is hoped that they can be applied to HIV, the disease that leads to AIDS, which has killed an estimated 32 million people since it was identified in 1981 and currently affects 38 million worldwide, with almost 690,000 dying annually.
The Oxford team is set to start the first phase of trials this month on 101 HIV-negative volunteers aged 18-50 from the UK, Kenya, Uganda and Zambia. Moderna will launch two mRNA trials later this year.
The location of the trials in Africa is significant; in recent years, treatments have been discovered to allow many people with HIV to live relatively normal lives, but can cost upward of $500,000 in developed countries.
Despite lower prices in developing countries, treatment is still often unaffordable for many African patients.
It is thought that up to half of the infected population on the continent are not even aware of their condition.
Despite the success in developing various COVID-19 vaccines, HIV remains far harder to treat than coronaviruses given its propensity to lie dormant for long periods, mutate more quickly than any other known disease, and imbed itself in patients’ DNA, making it all but impossible to permanently cure.
Oxford University’s Prof. Tomas Hanke told The Times: “The moment you’re infected with a single virus, it diversifies in your body. For the coronavirus there are four main variants we are worrying about around the world. For HIV we have to deal with 80,000.”
The team at the Jenner Institute will aim to stimulate the production of T-cells — which destroy other human cells already infected with a virus — through its modified adenovirus, ChAdOx-1, designed to train the cells to specifically recognize HIV.
Hanke said the T-cells could prove HIV’s “Achilles heel,” targeting areas “essential for the virus to survive and, importantly, common to most virus variants around the globe.”
The team hopes that if successful, the vaccine could be used to treat HIV-positive patients as early as August this year.
The Moderna team, meanwhile, believes that mRNA technology might be able to trigger enough B-cells — the part of the immune system that makes antibodies — to prevent HIV from adapting to its host.
This belief is based on a trial by Scripps Research, which found that in a small sample of 48 people given a similar vaccine, 97 percent showed a strong immune reaction against HIV.
Moderna’s European head Dan Staner told The Times: “I believe that mRNA technology is going to be revolutionary. It could be something spectacular if we were able, in the coming years, to bring a vaccine to treat HIV. Let’s let the science speak in the coming months and years, but I do think the sky’s the limit.”
Scripps Prof. William Schief said: “The rapid development and high efficacy of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine bodes really well for our work on HIV.”
Trials of HIV vaccines set to begin
https://arab.news/yh9z8
Trials of HIV vaccines set to begin
- Oxford-AstraZeneca, Moderna jabs based on technologies used to develop COVID-19 vaccines
- HIV estimated to have killed 32m people since it was identified in 1981
Internally displaced people reached 76 million in 2023 – monitoring group
- Almost 90 percent of the total displacement was attributed to conflict and violence
- The group reported a total of 3.4 million movements within Gaza in the last quarter of 2023
The Internal Displacement Monitoring Center report found that the number of internally displaced people, or IDPs, has jumped by 50 percent over the past five years and roughly doubled in the past decade. It doesn’t cover refugees — displaced people who fled to another country.
The report tracks two major sets of information. It counted 46.9 million physical movements of people in 2023 — sometimes more than once. In most of those cases, such as after natural disasters like floods, people eventually return home.
It also compiles the cumulative number of people who were living away from their homes in 2023, including those still displaced from previous years. Some 75.9 million people were living in internal displacement at the end of last year, the report said, with half of those in sub-Saharan African countries.
Almost 90 percent of the total displacement was attributed to conflict and violence, while some 10 percent stemmed from the impact of natural disasters.
The displacement of more than 9 million people in Sudan at the end of 2023 was a record for a single country since the center started tracking such figures 16 years ago.
That was an increase of nearly 6 million from the end of 2022. Sudan’s conflict erupted in April 2023 as soaring tensions between the leaders of the military and the rival Rapid Support Forces broke out into open fighting across the country.
The group reported a total of 3.4 million movements within Gaza in the last quarter of 2023 amid the Israeli military response to the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel. That means that many people moved more than once within the territory of some 2.2 million. At the end of the year, 1.7 million people were displaced in Gaza.
Group director Alexandra Bilak said the millions of people forced to flee in 2023 were the “tip of the iceberg,” on top of tens of millions displaced from earlier and continuing conflicts, violence and disasters.
The figures offer a different window into the impact of conflict, climate change and other factors on human movement. The UN refugee agency monitors displacement across borders but not within countries, while the UN migration agency tracks all movements of people, including for economic or lifestyle reasons.
Pakistan PM unveils broader plan to sell most state-owned firms
- Announcement comes amid talks on new IMF loan
- There can’t be any strategic commercial SOEs, says ex-minister
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan will privatise all state-owned enterprises, with the exception of strategic entities, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said on Tuesday, broadening its initial plans to sell only loss-making state firms to shore up its shaky finances.
The announcement came after Sharif headed a review meeting of the privatization process of loss-making state enterprises (SOEs), according to a statement from his office, which discussed a roadmap for privatization from 2024 to 2029.
“All of the state-owned enterprises will be privatised whether they are in profit or in losses,” Sharif said, adding that offloading the SOEs will save taxpayers’ money.
The statement didn’t clarify which sectors would be deemed strategic and non-strategic.
The announcement came a day after an International Monetary Fund (IMF) mission opened talks in Islamabad for a new long-term Extended Fund Facility (EFF), following Pakistan’s completion of a $3 billion standby arrangement last month, which had averted a sovereign debt default last summer.
Privatization of loss-making SOEs has long been on the IMF’s list of recommendations for Pakistan, which is struggling with a high fiscal shortfall and a huge external financing gap. Foreign exchange reserves are hardly enough to meet up to a couple of months of controlled imports.
The IMF says SOEs in Pakistan hold sizable assets inn comparison with most Middle East countries, at 44 percent of GDP in 2019, yet their share of employment in the economy is relatively low. The Fund estimates almost half of the SOEs operated at a loss in 2019.
Patchy success so far
Past privatization drives have been patchy, mainly due to a lack of political will, market watchers say.
Any organization that is involved in purely commercial work can’t be strategic by its very nature, which means there can’t be any strategic commercial SOEs, former Privatization Minister Fawad Hasan Fawad told Reuters on Tuesday.
“So to me there are really no strategic SOEs,” he said.
“The sooner we get rid of them the better. But this isn’t the first time we have heard a PM say this and this may not be the last till these words are translated into a strategic action plan and implemented.”
Islamabad has for years been pumping billions of dollars into cash-bleeding SOEs to keep them afloat, including one of the largest loss-making enterprises
Pakistan International Airline, which is in its final phase of being sold off, with a deadline
later this week to seek expressions of interest from potential buyers.
The pre-qualification process for PIA’s selloff will be completed by end-May, the privatization ministry told Tuesday’s meeting, adding discussions were underway to sell the airline-owned Roosevelt Hotel in New York.
It also said a government-to-government transaction on First Women Bank Ltd. was being discussed with the United Arab Emirates, and added that power distribution companies had also been included in the privatization plan for 2024-2029.
“The loss-making SOEs should be privatised on a priority basis,” Sharif said.
Russian president Putin to make a state visit to China this week
- The Kremlin in a statement confirmed the trip and said Putin was going on Xi’s invitation
BEIJING: Russian President Vladimir Putin will make a two-day state visit to China this week, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said Tuesday.
Putin will meet Chinese leader Xi Jinping during his visit starting on Thurday, it said.
The Kremlin in a statement confirmed the trip and said Putin was going on Xi’s invitation. It said that this will be Putin’s first foreign trip since he was sworn in as president and began his fifth term in office.
The two continent-sized authoritarian states, increasingly in dispute with democracies and NATO, seek to gain influence in Africa, the Middle East and South America. China has backed Russia’s claim that President Vladimir Putin launched his assault on Ukraine in 2022 because of Western provocations, without producing any solid evidence.
Pro-Palestinian protesters cleared from Geneva university
- Geneva university officials had asked the protesters on Monday to vacate the premises and protest in a different manner.
About 20 officers entered the UniMail building around 0300 GMT, a journalist from the Keystone-ATS news agency said.
“Most of the students were sleeping. After being gathered they were led to the underground parking garage,” Julie Zaugg, a journalist with LemanbleuTV channel, said on X.
She said they shouted pro-Palestinian slogans before being handcuffed and taken away in vans.
Geneva university officials had asked the protesters on Monday to vacate the premises and protest in a different manner.
Students demonstrations have gathered pace across Western Europe in recent weeks with protesters demanding an end to the Gaza bloodshed and to cut ties with Israel, taking their cue from demonstrations that have swept US campuses.
There have been similar protests in other Swiss universities and polytechnic schools including Lausanne, Berne, Basel and Zurich.
The bloodiest ever Gaza war began with Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of more than 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.
Militants also seized hostages, of whom Israel estimates 128 remain in Gaza, including 36 the military says are dead.
Israel’s bombardment and offensive in Gaza have killed at least 35,091 people, mostly women and children, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory.
Modi files candidacy for India election in Hindu holy city
- Varanasi is spiritual capital of Hinduism, where devotees come to cremate loved ones by Ganges river
- Modi has made acts of religious worship central fixture of his premiership since coming into power in 2014
Varanasi, India: India Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday formally submitted his candidacy to recontest the parliamentary seat for the Hindu holy city of Varanasi in a general election he is widely expected to win.
The marathon six-week poll concludes next month, and the 73-year-old premier used the election formality as a campaign event that paid deference to the country’s majority faith.
Varanasi is the spiritual capital of Hinduism, where devotees from around India come to cremate deceased loved ones by the Ganges river, and the premier has represented the city since sweeping to power a decade ago.
Hundreds of supporters had gathered outside a local government office to greet Modi when he arrived to lodge his nomination.
Footage showed the premier handing over his candidacy paperwork, flanked by a Hindu mystic.
“It’s our good fortune that Modi represents our constituency of Varanasi,” devout Hindu and farmer Jitendra Singh Kumar, 52, told AFP while waiting for the leader to emerge.
“He is like a God to people of Varanasi. He thinks about the country first, unlike other politicians.”
Modi, who has made acts of religious worship a central fixture of his premiership, had spent the morning visiting temples and offering prayers at the banks of the Ganges.
Tens of thousands of supporters had lined the streets of Varanasi to greet Modi as he arrived in the city on Monday, waving to the crowd from atop a flatbed truck as loudspeakers blared devotional songs.
Many along the roadside waved saffron-colored flags bearing the emblem of his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), throwing marigold flowers at the procession as it passed by.
Modi and the BJP are widely expected to win this year’s election, which is conducted over six weeks to ease the immense logistical burden of staging the democratic exercise in the world’s most populous country.
Varanasi is one of the last constituencies to vote on June 1, with counting and results expected three days later.
Since the vote began last month, Modi has made a number of strident comments against India’s 200-million-plus Muslim minority in an apparent effort to galvanize support.
He has used public speeches to refer to Muslims as “infiltrators” and “those who have more children,” prompting condemnation from opposition politicians and complaints to India’s election commission.
The ascent of Modi’s Hindu-nationalist politics despite India’s officially secular constitution has made the Muslims in the country increasingly anxious.
“We are made to feel as if we are not wanted in this country,” Shauqat Mohamed, who runs a tea shop in the city, told AFP.
“If the country’s premier speaks of us in disparaging terms, what else can we expect?” the 41-year-old added.
“We have to accept our fate and move on.”
