Antibody Discovered To Boost HIV Vaccines

An anonymous reader sends this clip from Scienceblog.com. "Scientists have discovered two potent human antibodies that can stop more than 90 percent of known global HIV strains from infecting human cells in the laboratory, and have demonstrated how one of these disease-fighting proteins accomplishes this feat. ... Research efforts to find individual antibodies that can neutralize HIV strains have been difficult because the virus continuously changes its surface proteins to evade recognition by the immune system. As a consequence of these changes, an enormous number of HIV variants exist worldwide. However, there are a few surface areas that remain nearly constant across all variants of HIV and scientists have now discovered two potent human antibodies that attach to one of these sites and can stop more than 90 percent of known global HIV strains from infecting human cells in the laboratory. ... The researchers also confirmed that VRC01 does not bind to human cells — a characteristic that might otherwise lead to its elimination during immune development, a natural mechanism the body employs to prevent autoimmune disease."

Comments

Re:Progress on this front is good

[Mister Whirly]

but they can probably cure or prevent the spread of at least a decent percentage of people.

but they can probably cure or prevent the spread of at least a decent percentage of wealthy people.

Which is already being done in the most part in most first world countries. The problem is the lower rung countries that can't afford even simple education on how the disease spreads. It is a Catch-22 of sorts - pharmaceutical companies don't want to come up with a cheap enough vaccine that will be effective in poorer countries where it is needed most becasue they won't profit enough. Unless someone can still make money off the vaccine, it will almost certainly never be done.

Re:WTF dude

[Rene S. Hollan]

Look. Either kill the brats that people produce and can't afford, or punish the people that produce the brats. But, certainly stop forcing other people to pay for the bastards.

Otherwise, with HIV treatments and possible cures improving, you will have more people blase about unprotected sex and unwanted kids demanding that the rest of us support them. Their kids will grow up to do the same, and their sheer numbers in a democratic society will result in enslavement of the responsible to support the lifestyle of the irresponsible.

Producing children you can't support should be one of the most heinous crimes there is, and punished accordingly.

What's with the Hitler reference, anyway? In my call to punish sexual irresponsibility with death, I do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, gender, or national origin.

If this is somehow unfair, because it has become so expensive to actually raise children, perhaps resources have been spread too thin, and the human species needs some serious culling to return to sustainable numbers for a larger fraction of the population. This achieves that too.