Key points
- Vaccines mimic a first encounter with an infection, so the body’s defences are trained to recognise and combat the real infection.
- After immunisation some long-lived memory cells remember the invader and wake up when it’s back, ensuring long-lasting protection.
- PrEP is not a vaccine: it protects against HIV only when the drug is present in the body.
A vaccine is, essentially, a fake infection.
Edward Jenner discovered in 1757 that if you gave people cowpox, they didn’t get smallpox. Even before then it had been known in some cultures that a mild form of a disease could protect people from a severe form. This is because if people have a mild infection – or are given a substance that is not an infection but looks like one to the immune system – then the immune system will remember it.
This remarkable ability of our immune system protects us from repeated severe illnesses that would otherwise eventually kill us.
Once the B-cells and T-cells that are the body’s disease fighters have reacted to an infection and helped to expel it from the body, then most die. But a small proportion of long-lived memory cells withdraw deep into the immune system’s centres in the bone marrow and lymph nodes. They are primed to wake up and start reproducing in huge numbers as soon as the infection they remember, or something that looks like it, comes along.
To use an analogy: if the body is a nightclub, the immune system is the security team. A vaccine is like a photo ID of a drug dealer, circulated to the security team. Then, if the real person ever turns up, they are either refused entry, or, if they manage to get in, apprehended and expelled. (HIV, however, is a master of disguise, and can subvert the security team.)
Is PrEP a vaccine?
Sometimes other ways of preventing HIV are spoken of as if they were a vaccine. This is particularly the case with pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). It’s a medicine, and it stops you getting HIV – so isn’t it a sort of vaccine?
The difference between a vaccine and PrEP is that a vaccine, because it mobilises our body’s own defences, may only have to be renewed occasionally or, in the case of childhood vaccines for things like polio or measles, never.
But PrEP stops working when you stop taking it.
In the near future, long-lasting formulations of HIV drugs will be available that may only have to be given once or twice a year as both treatment and PrEP – and then as injections or implants, so they may feel like a vaccine.
The power of a vaccine, however, lies in the fact that it strengthens your body’s own defences against viruses and bacteria, instead of simply killing or inactivating them with a drug.
Getting it to do this, though, especially with a foe as tricky as HIV, is not straightforward, and has already had to involve some groundbreaking science.