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Promising Vaccine Candidate Could Lead To a Definitive Cure For HIV
Zothecula writes "A very promising vaccine candidate for HIV/AIDS has shown the ability to completely clear the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), a very aggressive form of HIV that leads to AIDS in monkeys. Developed at the Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute at the Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU), the vaccine proved successful in about fifty percent of the subjects tested and could lead to a human vaccine preventing the onset of HIV/AIDS and even cure patients currently on anti-retroviral drugs."
Pharma companies make boatloads of money selling lifelong drugs to HIV sufferers. The last thing they want is a cure that'd kill the cash cow. Same reason why people with total kidney failure still can't benefit from artificial kidneys (too much money in dialysis machines, ambulance trips, special vacation packages... And no, kidney transplants don't kill the cash cow - patients are still on drugs for the rest of their lives) and why people diabetes still can't get artificial pancreata (too much money in insulin, needles...)
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Hell yeah!
Most of these potential vaccines turn out to be unworkable - but try long enough and hard enough, eventually scientists will hit upon a really good one.
I hear about these HIV/AIDS cures every year but they always disappear.
Why is figure 12 in the supplements, it seems to be the most important part (it compares cd4+ T-cell levels)? It is not even mentioned in the main text. Isn't reduction in the actual pathology the most important goal of a treatment?
I'm sure he'll just do something worse.
"Researchers working on a promising HIV vaccine just got hired by big pharma. The trials of this promising cure will go on under close scrutiny by their new man-in-charge".
This sounds really interesting...
It sounds like, instead of infecting the patient with a blunted virus that would eventually die away, they are permanently infecting the patient with a persistent virus that looks and acts like their target but causes no harm to keep up the immune response over the long haul. Sounds to me like a really interesting approach.
Maybe someone could enlighten me to the history of this approach in the treatment of other diseases, or is it novel?
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
Vets all over the world rejoice! Your monkeys will be free of HIV anytime now!
Monkeys? This could work for feline aids. Then I could vaccinate my cat! Then all the cat lovers on the internets could have aids free pussies!
I can't tell you how long I've wanted to have unprotected sex with monkeys. It doesn't feel the same when using a rubber.
There is an entire industry with an innate economic interest to obstruct, suppress and discredit any information about the eradication of diseases. The pharmaceutical industry makes over one trillion dollars from selling drugs for ongoing diseases. These drugs may relieve symptoms, but they do not cure. We have to realize that the mission of this industry is to make money from ongoing diseases. The cure or eradication of a disease leads to the collapse of a multi-billion dollar market of pharmaceuticals. We are bombarded with advertising campaigns by pharmaceutical companies wanting to make us believe that they are “Searching for Cures” “Striving for the Eradication of Diseases” or “Increasing Life Expectancy” and other false promises. With these deceptive statements, the pharmaceutical industry has for decades been able to disguise the true nature of its business – maximum profit from ongoing diseases. In other words, a cure for HIV will never see the light of day as it would undermine the profits made from selling life-long drugs to patients and would pretty much destroy the pharmaceutical industry. This would only benefit one company who would make massive profits and would refuse to share the cure with other companies and organisations.
That's odd. I've managed to avoid AIDs by using a rubber, not having unprotected gay sex (well, no gay sex in my case, but whatever) and not doing intravenous drugs.
Several companies are starting their phase 3 trials about now. I've invested in one of them. If they are successfull I'll retire, but I mostly invested just to make sure someone is working on it.
It takes time to move from "killing viruses in a jar" to actually making something that removes the viruses from people without killing them at the same time.
That was rejected http://now.msn.com/hiv-vaccine-trial-subjects-experience-no-adverse-effects from submissions...
* Interesting reading, & I, for one, hope they wipe this SOB out - it has royally messed up folks lives in many ways for decades now.
APK
P.S.=> Don't understand HOW or WHY it was rejected, but "that's slashdot" for you - Still, the folks in question here aren't the ONLY ONES ontop of a fix for this killer it seems... apk
Given that HIV/AIDS has made the population growth rates in certain places explode, and that these places have very young populations, would a definitive cure for HIV/AIDS set off a massive population timebomb? Has any thought been given to the consequences of very suddenly removing a big source of mortality?
As someone who actually worked on (albeit briefly) an HIV vaccine candidate, I'd like to comment that there have been a number of successful anti-SIV vaccines already, each of which have gone on to miserable -- and expensive -- failures when the underlying technology was applied to an HIV vaccine. And for those candidates that actually made it to human trials before failure, each attempt had a human cost as well (conspiracy theorists, go fuck yourselves).
That being said, the approach used is rather clever, if someone risky. The technique used is what is known as a "Heterologous Antigen" delivery, but in this case it has been combined with a persistent agent that establishes a life-long infection. The vector used was Rhesus Cytomegalovirus, which has a analogous human virus known as Human Cytomegalovirus, aka Herpesvirus-5.
CMV is a very common infection (in some countries 90+%, although somewhat lower in the United States). It's generally considered harmless to healthy individuals, and most pick it up during childhood, where it is commonly passed around in daycare centers and such. Initial symptoms are usually mild and non-specific (although in some individuals it can produce Mono-like symptoms), and typically afterwards the viral infection is well-controlled with no further signs of infection. Unlike some more famous members of the Herpesvirus family, it does not produce any sores or vesicles or such.
However, on occasion it can be dangerous, as one of the infectious agents that can sometimes result in TORCH syndrome effects (like the infamous "Blueberry Muffin Baby") when primary infections (first encounter with the infectious agent for an individual) occurs in a pregnant women. It can also be dangerous in immunosuppressed individuals, such as organ transplant recipients and advanced AIDS patients.
In spite of the population explosion in Africa, since the 1960s, charities still guilt people in wealthy, industrialized nations into giving lots of money. They've been guilting people since the 1970s. China was also poor in the 1970s...
The general public doesn't know. The politicians, and the charities will continue guilting people. They don't care.
Poor people gonna poor.
Meanwhile, the rest of us will continue to be grossly overweight and use water like it falls from the sky.
Sorry kids, Earth isn't full. It's just filled with idiots.
"simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), a very aggressive form of HIV"
Those are two different viruses, one is not a different form of another. Yes they are from the same family but they infect different hosts and are targeted (affected) by different host defenses....
How can they be sure that these monkeys haven't been cured simply by practicing better hygiene?
They use genetically modified CMV to keep the immune system alert and keep the sustained level of antibodies that kill SIV. CMV is otherwise harmless, but can not be cleared up completely and the body produces antibodies all the time. So, the immune system is fooled to produce antibodies that target SIV, trying to actually destroy CMV. Over time SIV gets wiped out even in viral reservoirs. After some months, the viral concentration is not even detectable anymore.
Why it works in 50% of monkeys is not yet understood. I guess in some of the monkeys, antibodies might not have properties that result with an attack on SIV (could be resolved by designing a better CMV hybrid), or the immune response wanes after some time. Maybe we humans will have more luck though - or maybe the teick doesn't work at all with out immune system.
Is it me or does this sound like it could quickly turn into some super virus gone wrong? "Sir our vaccine just bonded with the HIV T cells and has begun to rapidly spread throughout the infected hosts, SIR the hosts..they ar....they are eating the treatment staff!"
The day they come out with a guaranteed one-shot cure for AIDS, there will be f***ing in the streets.
"IT'S OVEEEEERRRRR!"
"WHOOOOOHOOOO!"
"Who are you? C'mere!"
"No, it's over! YEAH!"
And if you can't get laid that day, just cut it off!
Just as there's mass hysteria and a lot of unfounded accusations around the rubella and other vaccinations, there will be with the HIV vaccine as well. Ignorant parents will insist it made their kid autistic or ADHD or a gangbanger or whatever.
Somewhat misleading - I listened to this topic on NPR for the past week (first heard about it Monday - yay /.!). 50% of test cases were successful, so while the vaccine is a good thing to continue to investigate, "very promising" is a bit off as it needs more work. Although, it should also be noted that SIV is a much much more deadly disease than HIV/AIDS.
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If you can posit a mechanism where a vaccine against a virus might restore your tcell count but leave the virus untouched, you might have a point, but there is no such mechanism.
Vaccine, no. But some other techniques might result in such a situation; gene-therapy to produce a functional CCR5-delta32-like state of resistance might do it, if the result was a mixed population of both altered and unaltered T-cells.
While no succesful implementation of a therapy currently exists, the strategy is thought to be sound, given the success of the Berlin Patient example, which used a transplant of naturally occurring CCR5-delta32 bone-marrow. Unlike the Berlin Patient however (who was a leukemia patient to begin with), complete eradication of original host immune system before therapy is likely too risky for general use, which is why I think a mixed susceptible/resistant system afterwards is a more likely outcome.
Of course, this assumes that having a population of some (instead of all) HIV-resistant T-cells is sufficient to protect against the more serious consequences of AIDS. It may not be a true assumption, given that we now know HIV has cytopathological effects beyond that of killing CD4 cells.
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