Nigerian Researchers Developing Vaginal Gel For HIV Prevention
The Nigerian Institute of Medical Research (NIMR) says it is currently working on a novel microbicide gel for the prevention of HIV among women.
A research fellow at the Clinical Science Department in NIMR, Dr Sabdat Ekama, disclosed this to journalists in Lagos.
Ekama said microbicides are medicaments containing anti-HIV agents, which would be applied vaginally or rectally to prevent HIV infection. She also stated that women globally are disproportionately affected by HIV because heterosexual intercourse is a major mode of male-to-female HIV transmission.
She further pointed out that several preventive measures had been put in place over the years, such as post-exposure prophylaxis, prevention of mother-to-child transmission, pre-exposure prophylaxis, and others.
Ekama also explained that despite these preventive methods, the annual HIV global statistics team reported 1.3 million new infections globally in 2024, hence the urgent need for strategies to prevent new infections.
She pointed out that over the years, researchers have actually worked on microbicide development, but the majority of them failed in clinical trials because they were fraught with challenges.
According to her, the institute has looked at the gaps and the lacunae of the previous HIV microbicides and looked at how they can close these gaps to come up with a novel job microbicide vagina gel that will be suited for use amongst women.
“We have come up with a smart gel that is designed to be temperature-sensitive, such that, when it is liquid and at room temperature, if applied to the body system, it becomes highly viscous to prevent leakage.
“We employed a targeted drug delivery method to combat the challenges of conventional microbicides by using two anti-HIV agents, and we looked at the challenges of leakage. Previous microbicide gels tested in clinical trials reported challenges of vaginal leakage during home administration, cultural dependence, use, and wetness, and all these challenges affected adherence to use and compliance to use,” Ekama said.
The expert also noted that research works are at present in the clinical stage amongst animal models, as the team looks forward to favourable outcomes, which will be a precursor to human clinical trials.
“This research project has gone to the individual preliminary research stage, in which we assessed its safety on vaginal cells and also its efficacy on the HIV-1 VL viral stream.
“The results were promising, and this gave us justification to proceed to the animal model preclinical studies, and we are also trying to assess the toxicity, the tolerability and the safety in animal models,” she explained.
Nigerian Researchers Developing Vaginal Gel For HIV Prevention is first published on The Whistler Newspaper
