Bonaventura Clotet: "With the HIV vaccine, we re-educate the immune system to react to all the viral variants in the infected body"

Around 300 people attended the lecture given at midday on Tuesday in the Aula Magna at the UVic by Dr Bonaventura Clotet, director and researcher of the University's AIDS and Related Diseases Chair. In a lecture entitled "The eradication of AIDS is now possible," Clotet reviewed the basic aspects of the disease and talked about recent breakthroughs that have taken place in the fight for the cure.
 
During his talk, Bonaventura Clotet reviewed the various strategies for treating HIV currently included in several research lines, and focused on research into the creation of a therapeutic vaccine, which he has directed himself, for which the first results were presented just a few weeks ago. To explain the objectives of this new treatment graphically, the speaker compared HIV with fire. "If you throw water on it, or in other words you apply a treatment, you put out the fire, but you still always have embers that can re-ignite, and this is what happens when the patient stops taking the existing antiretrovirals," said Clotet.

However, the therapeutic vaccine activates the immune system to attack HIV directly and according to Clotet, "re-educates the immune system to react to all viral variants present in the infected body" so that after the vaccination, "there is no need to take antiretrovirals." In fact, while with conventional treatments the virus is reactivated after a period of four to eight weeks without any medication, with the vaccine this does not happen. "There are currently five people who have gone than 12 weeks without having to take antiretrovirals, and one that has gone 28 weeks," said Clotet, who said he was convinced of the maxim that "if one person is curable, the entire disease is curable."

The rector of the UVic-UCC, Jordi Montaña, introduced the speaker, describing him as "someone who knows the limits of medical science and the personal and social boundaries facing people infected with AIDS." The rector, who chaired the event which was part of the UVic's twentieth anniversary celebrations, considered some of the University's main achievements in recent years, including the UVic's federation with Manresa and the opening of its facilities in Granollers and Barcelona, and said that the culmination of these first twenty years "will be the allocation of places to start teaching the EHEA Degree Course in Medicine next year." According to Montaña, "now is the time to relaunch the project for the young generations that are coming through, with new habits, new perspectives, new technologies and new ideas for training and life."
 
Dr Clotet graduated in Medicine from the UAB and gained his doctorate in 1981 for his research on prognostic markers for connective tissue diseases. He is head of the HIV unit at the Germans Trias i Pujol University Hospital in Badalona, director of the IrsiCaixa AIDS Research Institute, and co-director of the HIVACAT AIDS Vaccine Research Programme. He is a lecturer at the UAB and the Director of the Official University Master's Degree in Pathogenesis and Treatment of AIDS. He has also been director of the AIDS and Related Diseases Chair at the UVic-UCC since 2013.