my herpes vaccine study: totally negative

[jinian]

For the first time, my electronic subscription to Science has been helpful! I discovered that the herpes vaccine study I was in a few years ago showed the vaccine to be completely unhelpful. Initially, a previous study had shown no benefit to most people, but there was a seemingly significant result that women who had no herpes virus infection whatsoever might have had boosted immunity against HSV-2 ("genital herpes" though either can infect you anywhere really). HSV-2 isn't usually considered all that dangerous, though it's really not pleasant and it's known to act synergistically with HIV. Because HSV-1 (cold sores) is so similar to HSV2, it's thought to offer some protection against later infection with HSV-2, and the people who did the original 2002 study thought that effect might have been swamping a weak vaccine effect in those with HSV-1. It was worth following up; a weak effect is a sign that the vaccine is doing something right.

Since I've never had a cold sore or anything resembling initial herpes infection, I joined the study and found that indeed I was virus-free. (Most people do carry HSV-1, even if they don't know it, so this was lucky!) I was vaccinated in two stages, and over about a year and a half, I returned to the study site and had blood draws. I never did hear whether I was treatment or control, or the study result, though I've moved since then. I'd been starting to wonder what the result had been. Turns out there was no benefit from this vaccine after all. No one can quite explain the protective effect that seemed to appear in the last study, though there's some idea that the populations recruited were different; the original study looked at women in "discordant relationships" where they were involved with someone HSV-2 positive, and this one didn't have that criterion. Possibly there's low-level exposure to herpes antigen in that situation, and the vaccine was sufficient to build immunity from that but not from zero.

Unfortunately, there is no other promising vaccine in development. It's now known to be non-easy, so it'll be harder to get funding from industry and others to work on the problem.

(In other disastrous science news, robots think we taste like bacon.)

Comments

[marzipan-pig.livejournal.com]

Wow, that original statement (at the link) was really sad sounding.

I always kind of feel bad for vaccine researchers, b/c the stakes are SO HIGH and yet most of the studies either fail miserably or make people worse. Like, look, we're probably not going to get another smallpox vaccine, serendipity only works every once in a while, and sometimes throwing money at the problem isn't enough.

Cool that you got to be part of determining this though!

[katybeth]

Interesting. Thanks for the followup, and for being part of the study.

[beaq.livejournal.com]

Huh!