Word: hiv
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...Secretary of Health and Human Services boldly announced in 1984 that there would be an AIDS vaccine within two years. The discovery of an AIDS-causing virus (HIV), she said, was already demonstrating "the triumph of science over a dreaded disease...
...Today, 25 years and many failed attempts later, an AIDS vaccine seems as elusive as ever. New HIV infections still greatly outpace the number of people being brought onto antiretroviral treatment, with some 2.5 million new HIV cases worldwide in 2007, including nearly half a million children. That same year, more than 2 million people died of AIDS. (See the top 10 medical breakthroughs...
...very small fraction of people infected with HIV, the body's immune response is able to control the virus and prevent it from progressing to full-blown AIDS. Rockefeller scientists found six such people with high levels of the antibodies that inhibit HIV proliferation and keep it from invading new cells. Taking blood samples from these special few, the researchers isolated the antibodies and set about discovering how they work...
...human immune system does not mount an attack against a single target on HIV. Instead, the body deploys many dozens of antibodies - the researchers cloned 502 antibodies from the six patients - and together they attack many different virus targets. Individually, each antibody may have little effect, but as a group - or even in lab-created packages of 20 to 50 antibodies - they seem to confer some protection against disease progression. "It's the first time that anybody's really looked at what the antibody response is," says senior investigator Michel Nussenzweig, head of the Rockefeller University's Laboratory of Molecular...
...sounds simple. But this reverse-engineering approach, finding inspiration for new vaccines by studying HIV immunity in nature, would have been impossible back in 1984 - or, indeed, until just a few years ago. Too little was known about the virus's structure or about the human immune system in general. One recent necessary breakthrough, Nussenzweig says, was finding a way to identify the blood cells that create HIV-specific antibodies. It was only after those cells could be separated from the bloodstream that scientists like Nussenzweig and Johannes Scheid, the first author on the Nature paper, could begin to study...