The National Institutes of Health on Wednesday announced that it will begin clinical trial testing of a new HIV vaccine in the United States and South Africa.

"NIH scientific advances continue to be vital to achieving our national goal of ending the HIV epidemic by 2030," Assistant Secretary of Health Rachel Levine said on X, formerly Twitter. "This HIV vaccine clinical trial is another step toward our bold goal."

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The novel vaccine, known as VIR-1388, uses a weaker version of cytomegalovirus, or CMV, to deliver the HIV vaccine materials to a patient's immune system. Researchers hope that this method of vaccine delivery will help overcome the problem of waning immunity that has thwarted other attempts at HIV vaccinations.

"CMV has been present in much of the global population for centuries" and presents often with no or few symptoms, the NIH said in a press release. "CMV remains detectable in the body for life, which suggests it has the potential to deliver and then safely help the body retain HIV vaccine material for a long period."

The NIH, through the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has funded research into CMV vector vaccines for HIV since 2004. Funding for the clinical trial is also coming from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as well as Vir Biotechnology, which is based in San Francisco, California.

The NIAID-funded HIV Vaccine Trials Network is conducting the study, which will take place in six locations in the United States and four in South Africa. The study will enroll 95 HIV-negative participants who are already living with asymptomatic CMV, with initial study results being available in late 2024.

A vaccine for HIV has been notoriously difficult because it is one of the most quickly evolving and rapidly replicating viruses, producing multiple mutations when it copies its genetic material.

Clinical trials of an HIV vaccine using mRNA technology were announced by the NIH in March 2022. Researchers anticipated that, because mRNA vaccines are highly adaptable, they would be uniquely able to deliver a successful way to target the evolving virus cells.

“There’s an obvious agreement that we need a vaccine," Paul Volberding, Infectious Disease News chief medical editor, said in April when a large clinical trial that began in 2019 officially stopped. "This has proved to be probably the toughest vaccine scientists have worked to create."

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An estimated 39 million people, including 1.5 million children, were living with HIV by the end of 2022, according to the World Health Organization. Nearly 1 in 25 adults in Africa have HIV, accounting for more than two-thirds of the people living with the virus.

More than 40 million people have died from HIV-related illness since the epidemic began over 40 years ago.