Word: hiv
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There are few who still shrug off HIV and AIDS as exotic calamities that befall only specific segments of the world's population. But many of us are probably oblivious to just how badly the virus is ravaging our nation's capital. According to a city report, 3% of Washington, D.C., residents suffer from HIV or AIDS - a figure that ranks as the highest in the nation and far outstrips the 1% benchmark at which a health issue becomes a "generalized and severe" epidemic. The district's HIV/AIDS administration director, Shannon Hader, couched the severity of the problem in stark...
...certainly will not be quick. Still, this work is "identifying possible targets in the virus, and that's really the exciting part of it," says Dr. Adel Mahmoud, a lecturer at Princeton University and the former head of Merck Vaccines, the company that created the most promising HIV-vaccine candidate to date, which ultimately failed in clinical trials in 2007. (That drug, V520, used a common-cold virus to ferry three synthetic HIV genes into the body to trigger cell-mediated immunity. It was tested in several thousand people, but failed to provide immunity.) "We need to go back...
...fact, the search for an AIDS vaccine has been thwarted over and over by the tricky, unexpected nature of HIV, whose behavior is only now coming to be understood. The human immune system does not appear to develop an effective response to HIV simply by being exposed to a virus surface protein or two - an approach that has worked for many other vaccines in the past. A hepatitis B shot, for example, contains rearranged, nonpathogenic bits of the virus that causes the liver disease. The body produces antibodies in response to the vaccine, conferring immunity to the live virus...
...compounds of two previously tested candidates, just in case they turn out to be effective together where each failed individually. Since Merck's setback in 2007, however, some scientists have questioned current vaccine-development tactics. And some researchers, including those in Nussenzweig's lab, are now trying to produce HIV immunity through antibodies; but despite good results in primates, they have had no luck so far in humans with a single-antibody vaccine...
...major problem with HIV is that it mutates in the body very quickly, so the immune system doesn't always recognize the virus as something it's encountered before. This is a stumbling block for vaccinemakers, but it's also the reason so few people are able to control an HIV infection naturally, like the six people studied in Nussenzweig's lab. Now, understanding this process could be key to the next vaccines. "It's just that the antibodies are too late," Nussenzweig says, referring to the typical immune response. "The antibody is always chasing the virus around...