Moderna's partnership will build on a new and unproven vaccine approach William Schief, an immunology professor at Scripps Research and vaccine design director of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, presented Moderna's investors with unpublished data from an HIV vaccine trial presented at a virtual AIDS research conference in February. The trial, which started in 2018, was conducted with 48 HIV-negative adults, and will serve as preliminary basis off which Moderna and its collaborators will further study and test a vaccine approach targeting broadly neutralizing antibodies. Subjects were given either a low or high dose of the protein-based vaccine candidate, which was designed to activate certain "naive" B cells of the immune system.