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A promising new AIDS vaccine may be able to completely eradicate HIV viruses from the body in near future, a new study has claimed.

The HIV vaccine candidate developed at Oregon Health & Science University has demonstrated the ability to remove AIDS causing virus completely from non-human primates, researchers said.

Currently the promising vaccine is being tested on a non-human primate form of HIV, called simian immunodeficiency virus or SIV which is responsible for AIDS in monkeys.

It is hoped that an HIV-form of the vaccine candidate can soon be tested in humans following further development.

“To date, HIV infection has only been cured in a very small number of highly publicised but unusual clinical cases in which HIV-infected individuals were treated with anti-viral medicines very early after the onset of infection or received a stem cell transplant to combat cancer,” said Louis Picker, associate director of the OHSU Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute.

“This latest research suggests that certain immune responses elicited by a new vaccine may also have the ability to completely remove HIV from the body,” said Picker.

Researchers have recently discovered that pairing CMV with SIV had a unique effect. They also found that a modified version of CMV engineer to express SIV proteins generates and indefinitely maintains so-called “effector memory” T-cells that are capable of searching out and destroying SIV-infected cells.

T-cells are one of the key components of the body’s immune system, which fights off diseases. But T-cells extracted by conventional vaccines of SIV itself are not able to eradicate the virus.