HIV vaccine turns muscle into antibody factories

The question HIV researchers have been trying to solve for years is ‘How does one deal with a virus which attacks the immune system that is trying to fight it off?’ The answer some American researchers have come up with is: to bypass the immune system altogether.

Currently, Phillip Johnson, of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, and his colleagues are using a novel vaccine for monkeys infected with the monkey equivalent of HIV – simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV). The vaccine is a radical new approach to treating the virus. The vaccine instead uses the monkeys muscles as factories in which antibodies that can kill the SIV virus are secreted.

The monkey’s muscles are injected with a harmless strain of the virus, which contain genes for making immunoadhesins (antibodies pre-selected to attack SIV) -conventional vaccines primed ones immune system for attack before it is exposed to the real pathogen. Thus "Instead of expecting the person's own immune system to do the job, we're giving them their own supply of 'off-the-peg' antibodies," Johnson says.

The article goes on to mention that given such strong proof that the vaccine works in monkeys, the team is ‘gearing up for clinical trials’, with human antibodies from individuals who are HIV resistant.

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Articles:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227094.700-hiv-vaccine-turns-muscle-into-antibody-factories.html