Scientists Find A 'Weak Spot' In HIV That May Pave The Way To A Vaccine (futurism.com)

iONiUM quotes a report from Futurism: Research conducted by a team from the National Institutes of Health reported a new vulnerable site on HIV for vaccines to target. It is based on an antibody from the blood of an HIV-infected patient that binds with the virus and also prevents it from infecting a cell. A recent press release reports that a team of scientists led by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has discovered a new "weak spot" in HIV that vaccines can target. The area, called the fusion peptide, is a simple structure of eight amino acids that helps the virus fuse with a cell. According to the study, the team used a particularly powerful antibody, called VRC34.01, taken from the blood of an unnamed HIV-positive patient that caught the weak spot in the virus. It's not only capable of binding with the virus through the fusion peptide but also preventing it from infecting an entire cell.

Comments

Nice! I hope it works out

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Sweeeeet! Now Slashdot nerds can have no sex but without a condom!

How is the person HIV positive?

[MobyDisk]

Can someone explain to me: If the person has an antibody that prevents HIV from binding to a cell, how are they HIV positive?

Re:How is the person HIV positive?

[Khyber]

HIV positive refers to the presence of the virus in the blood, not that it has infected any cells.

Re:How is the person HIV positive?

[Firethorn]

HIV is a retrovirus, it inserts it's code into the cell where it stays long term until triggered to replicate somehow. Ergo, a person could have all active viral particles removed and still be infected unless you blow away all the infected cells somehow as well. This is a large part of the reason why HIV can't be cured.

That being said, if they can figure out how to train the body to produce these antibodies, it's possible that one could keep the infection rate of the viral particles low enough(the antibody isn't going to block 100% of viral particles from depositing their payload) that a person is effectively immune to the disease, because it just won't be successful enough at infecting cells. That would probably also have the benefit that even if they're exposed, there will be a prompt enough immune response to keep them from being a realistic infection vector, so no Typhoid Mary for them.

That being said, there's a high probability that a vaccinated person would test as HIV positive today, because most HIV tests look for the antibodies, not the virus. Give them a vaccine that stimulates antivirus production...

Re:How is the person HIV positive?

[Anonymous Coward]

The antibody isn't 100% effective- although perhaps effective enough for people to lead a normal life. Their T-cell count was nearly normal, meaning they are doing a great job of fighting, but there was lots of HIV RNA around, meaning they were still quite infected. I believe this patient would show little to no signs of the disease while still being highly contagious.
Who knows if it's effective enough to be a vaccine, but perhaps the bigger breakthough is that this antibody has found a chink in the armor that we are likely to be able to exploit even better in the future.
From the supplementary material:
"This donor was diagnosed with HIV in 2000. After more than nine years of
infection, this donor showed a CD4 T-cells count of 463 cells/ml and a plasma HIV-1
viral load of 4920 RNA copies/ml at the time of sample collection. This donor was not on
antiretroviral treatment. "

Re:How is the person HIV positive?

[Andvari]

That being said, there's a high probability that a vaccinated person would test as HIV positive today, because most HIV tests look for the antibodies, not the virus. Give them a vaccine that stimulates antivirus production...

This is not true, vaccinated people would not test HIV positive. first line HIV screens look for certain kinds of antibodies, the particular antibody the article is referring is not one of those antibodies.

The initial HIV screen is a combined antibody/antigen assay, if that is positive a follow up screen, called a Western Blot, is done. The western blot looks for additional antibodies, such as: p24, gag, pol etc... If enough of these bands are positive then the person is considered HIV positive. There are cases where a western blot can return as indeterminate, in some cases (like a grp IV) the person is most likely positive but may not be. Interestingly, with the introduction of post exposure prophylaxis many people are now returning indeterminate western blots and never fully sero-convert despite being HIV positive. In these cases pro-viral DNA is used as a diagnosis.

Give Credit Where Credit Is Due

[sexconker]

They found an HIV-patient exhibiting an effective (to what degree is unclear from TFS) immune response to the HIV virus.

Let's give credit to the patient or the patient's immune system.

When Patent Time Rolls Around ...

[jasnw]

... is the patient whose body produced this antibody going to get a cut, or is it just the researchers and their organizations who will gain?

Re:When Patent Time Rolls Around ...

[Locke2005]

Henrietta Lacks never got a dime.

Re:When Patent Time Rolls Around ...

[GuB-42]

He is probably receiving state of the art treatment now. If he ends up completely cured, that's a nice compensation.

Re:When Patent Time Rolls Around ...

[techdolphin]

This is government funded research so hopefully everybody gets a cut. Government spending--this is important--government spending creates investments that help individuals, states, and the nation. Spending on education, basic research, and scientific infrastructure enabled this discovery, which could prove very beneficial to individuals and society.

What, no big pharma conspiracy posts?

[mark-t]

The story's been out for an hour, and nary a comment about how it makes no sense to cure when they can keep profiting from ongoing treatment. I don't know whether to be relieved or disappointed. (oooh.... did I just really use the word 'nary' in a sentence???)

LTNP

[Anonymous Coward]

After initial infection, the virus will enter a long-dormant period, during which it will continue to mutate and wear down the immune system. In most people, this period will end after a decade or so, when the immune system "tires" and allows viral load to increase. The destruction of CD4 helper cells (most by induced apoptosis, a small percentage by infection) opens the body to oprotunistic infection, which (barring treatment) is usually the end of the story.

A small group of the infected, called "Long Term Non-Progressors," are able to create highly-effective antibodies in their B-cells. When they do this, the viral load never increases, and they remain in the latency period indefinitely.

The antibodies produced by such people have been studied with X-ray crystalography. Their B-cells can actually be used in the "monoclonal antibody" process to create antibody solutions for other people that can be injected and used in treatment.

In any case, these highly-effective antibodies are only produced after years of interaction of the virus with the immune system. They are not presented upon initial infection, and LTNP individuals don't differ from the normal immune reaction during the first six months.

Re:Billions in Research

[Locke2005]

Any idea how many children are born already infected with HIV? What sin did they commit?

Re:Vaccines don't work.

[ledow]

You're an idiot.

Vaccines do not cause learning disabilities. Asthma has increased in correlation but it's not causative - working in schools I can assure you that asthma and allergies are on the rise because of LACK OF EXPOSURE to things like grass, pollen, nuts, etc. No asthma in unvaccinated? Bollocks. Healthier? Bollocks. Disease resistance? Bollocks. Safety studies, stop making up criteria that they don't meet because that's BOLLOCKS.

The Dr you quote thought that Vitamin C cured lots of things that it doesn't. The guy published only in the 70's and 80's, things have moved on.

Though I'm not in the "YOU MUST HAVE YOUR CHILDREN VACCINATED OR YOU'RE EVIL AND KILLING THE WHOLE WORLD" camp, I disagree with almost everything you quoted here even more.

Vaccination, like ANY MEDICAL PROCEDURE, it not without statistical outliers, mistakes, and risks. Nothing medical is risk-free. 99.9999% of all medicine is working out if what you take and might end up with is better than what you already have. Drug interactions are difficult and people work differently.

Like the HIV story at the moment - a patient, of their own accord, formed an antibody that stopped HIV. Now scientists are taking that antibody and hopefully forming a vaccine or kinds. But HIV is different in every person and evolution relies on something, completely by chance, working differently in one animal to every other animal of the same species. That's how it works, and that's why vaccines cannot be "safe".

But, as a mathematician, the overwhelming, massively tested, calculated, verified and best odds are that vaccination will help an individual, and a population, more than they will harm it. Nobody can guarantee that for any individual, because we're playing biology roulette. But we're making sure we're playing on a table with only one tiny "you die" against a myriad "you never get the disease, or die from it" slots.

Stop being an idiot, Dr. M.D. PhD means nothing. Ask my geneticist girlfriend who's qualified to tell half of London if they have cancer, or if their unborn child is likely to have a crippling genetic disease or not and works with lots of wackos, or my multiple-Dr PhD father-in-law who has PhD's in everything from chemistry to physics to sports science. One wacko Dr doesn't make everything he said 30 years ago true just because he has letters on his name.

The overwhelming, peer-reviewed, best-guess of established science nowadays is that people should be vaccinated. And, in fact, one British doctor with a similar amount of letters was SO WRONG in his autism/vaccination link that he went to jail for it. Not just a slap on a wrist. Not just "Oh, his science is poor". But "Your assessment and scaremongering was so damn incorrect, and you knew it, and you faked results and made up numbers, and you went so public and scared so many people incorrectly, that it was criminal."

I can find a wacko PhD in any field, from astrophysics to maths (so many claimed to have proven Fermat's Last Theorem etc. and ALL of them were wrong until the 1990's and that took nearly 10 years to prove right even though it actually LOOKED right for a change), biology to environmental studies. A sound-bite from a wacko is not science.