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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."
But I have to wonder if the region that doesn't normally morph will start morphing if it starts being targetted. HIV is a tough little bugger. Very borg-like.
It is unwise to ascribe motive
and yet I wonder if the guy whose body they came from will get any piece of the profits.. Let's hope he does..
Why?
The only logically reason why he deserves anything would be to encourage others to get tested for similar things, and I don't see too many researchers looking desperately looking for random people to come forward and have their antibodies tested.
It won#t start suddenly morphing. What will happen, is that the strain which DO morph will be selected for, as they will more easily spread, than the one stopped by this antibody. But I would not put my hope too high. "In laboratory" means in-vitro. A lot of stuff works in vitro, but never pan out.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
He won't. You opt out as part of your agreement to lab testing. There was an article about this on NPR a couple months ago, but I can't seem to find it.
No. You're drastically reducing the number of possible infections. 90% of exposures would be immunized against.
I grew up in the 80s when HIV was big news and - here in the UK - TV ads warning of the dangers of unsafe sex were aired. A whole generation seemed to have grown up paranoid (perhaps rightly) about unprotected sex.
That seems to have faded and it's now seen as largely a third world problem. It seems that teenagers and twenty somethings have drifted back into behaviour that predated the advent of AIDS - and more. It's like they've worked out that it's still unlikely to affect them as it hasn't really got a grip in their demographic.
Sadly that's led to a massive increase in other, albeit treatable, STDs.
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
So now we can all start fucking again?
If you want to pretend that HIV was the reason people on Slashdot weren't fucking, you go right ahead.
That's a great outcome. Remember, the people who have a strain of HIV from the other 90%, aren't going to get re-infected with one from the 10%. They will just be rendered effectively uncontagious.
It's a one-time thing, to be sure; the resistant strain will spread at the same rate of growth - but it will do so from a severely stunted starting point.
Assuming this works, it means a one-time epidemiological "rewind" - suddenly we'll have the much lower HIV rates we had 30 or 40 years ago, but we'll have the knowledge and preparedness of today. Imagine if we could use 2010's pharmaceuticals to nip the epidemic in the bud back then!
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
I'm pretty ok with people getting money for doing something valuable. I was happy when Linus became a millionaire, I'll be happy if the people who invent an AIDS vaccine become millionaires. Other people having money doesn't reduce my happiness one bit, and when they get it for doing something awesome, it increases my happiness.
Qxe4
Yes, that explains why AIDS treatments have been getting better and cheaper.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
An HIV researcher's take on the news.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I fail to see the hype. There are plenty of great anti-HIV antibodies which are well described. These have a great cross-reactivity to many HIV strains and are directed against very conserved regions of envelope proteins. The trouble lies that no one so far has been able to find a way to produce them in a patient's body in large amounts. In addition, it is well known that Ab response is not really the way to go. Current HIV vaccines designs are moving towards inducing a innate immunity responses and also focus on T-cell not B-cell mediated immunity.
If my memory of microbiology serves me correctly, the variance in HIV has more to do with the super error-prone reverse transcription process than it does with the virus actually trying to evade destruction. Transcribing DNA from RNA also requires elements of the host cell, which can vary from person to person, and there is no error checking done at all.
Yeah, almost like it was intelligently designed to be as difficult to kill as possible.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."