A research group from St.Petersburg Polytechnic University led by Professor Andrei Kozlov has published their study’s findings regarding HIV vaccine creation.

With the support of a grant from the Russian Science Foundation, they studied the features of transmitted variants of the HIV-1 virus for around two years. This kind of HIV transmission is the most typical in the Russian Federation.

In this study, scientists analyzed the blood samples of drug users, who were injected with acute or early stages of HIV infection. The transmission of one variant was detected in around 70% of people. This data was obtained via the single genome analysis (SGA) method, which analyses around 20-30 single genomes. Additionally, the scientists used next-generation sequencing approach (NGS), for analyzing up to 5000 genomes. Using this method, scientists reported that all viruses were the "descendants" of one virus particle. This occurrence is termed as the genetic bottleneck effect. These findings were published in the journal AIDS Research and Human Retroviruses.

Professor Kozlovsaid, "Though this work is fundamental, we are working with the genes of the viruses, which can be used in design of vaccine against HIV. So to speak, it is necessary to create the vaccine not against all possible viruses, but against those which are transmitted and cause the infection. We will use these data in the further work on HIV vaccine development."