This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

HIV head

This week, researchers from the National Institutes of Health reported that they've found a new "weak spot" in HIV that they hope to be able to exploit to blueprint an effective vaccine. It'southward an exciting suggestion, every bit the disease continues to ravage people around the earth while confounding efforts to create an effective cure. This breakthrough wouldn't pb to a cure for those already infected, only information technology could dramatically tiresome the spread of the affliction to new people.

The written report looked at the antibodies present in an unnamed patient, finding a very strong binder to the HIV viral capsids called VRC34.01, part of a group called broadly neutralizing HIV antibodies (bnAbs). They constitute that it is effective at stopping HIV from infecting cells, meaning that if they can blueprint a vaccine to prompt the body to release this antibiotic, it's possible they could cheaply make most or all people allowed.

HIV 2What's most interesting is that these antibodies seem to bind to the so-called "fusion peptide" that allows the virus to fuse with and enter a jail cell. That's important because the fusion peptide is very short, only eight amino acids long. This means that there's not much room for evolution to screw with the sequence — irresolute whatsoever one animo acid changes 12.5% of the overall sequence, likely making fusion impossible.

This means that VRC34.01 can rely on an unchanging target sequence. And since this fusion peptide must get right up close to a jail cell surface in club to work, the virus can't only grow a big bump to physically block the antibody from getting in. Though HIV is legendary for its ability to quickly evolve in response to a medicine or whatever other force per unit area, even it can't survival-of-the-fittest its way out of certain multi-faceted problems.

That's what makes this a "weak spot" — past phenomenon cures like AZT piece of work for a while, simply HIV ever finds a way to modify or live without the specific construction involved in the drug's action, and so somewhen patients stop seeing benefits from the drug. By targeting a sequence that HIV cannot modify or hide abroad without making itself useless, the promise is that this could be the perfect defence machinery.

antibody antigen recognition

The antigen stimulates release of the antibody — so now these scientists need to discover an antigen that corresponds to the newly discovered antibiotic.

The thing about antibodies is that they do their work in the areas between cells, which means they can stop viruses from getting into cells, or betwixt cells, only in one case genetic material does go inside a cell, it's in there. So these antibodies will exercise nothing for HIV positive people, but they could provide yet some other means to partially repress the spread of the virus inside the trunk. Information technology's this spread that causes HIV to become "full blown" AIDS, and keeping that spread irksome and the "viral load" low is important to keeping HIV positive people from developing symptoms.

Like cancer research, HIV inquiry has had so many "breakthroughs" that people naturally go contemptuous about any progress seemingly fabricated toward a broad-ranging cure. But these sorts of partial cures accept turned HIV from an assured, and quite proximate death into a dangerous but manageable affliction, like diabetes. Between direction of infected people, and prevention of further spread of the infection, it should be possible to finer "cure" the disease, or at to the lowest degree its symptoms.

One interesting side notation is that HIV is very similar to the hijacked viruses that deliver engineered genes in advanced biological experiments and haemorrhage edge medical treatments. Could a therapy similar this make an HIV-positive person immune to potentially life-extending gene therapies, as well?