Word: nabel
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...move on to far tougher challenges--using vaccines to fight off cancer, for example, or attack the protein deposits that clog the brains of Alzheimer's patients or even as a potential treatment for heart disease. "We are in a new era of vaccine research," says Dr. Gary Nabel, director of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). "It's an amazingly exciting time to be in this field...
...recent strategy, shown effective for the first time at NIAID, may be able to thwart this evasive action. Known as "prime-boost," it gives the immune system a whiff of the virus' scent before hitting it with the actual vaccine. In Nabel's lab, that whiff consists of a snippet of DNA from HIV's outer coating--not enough to trigger a full immune response but, as his work was the first to show in animals, enough to put the system on alert. In the past this strategy hasn't worked in humans because our immune system, unlike those...
...whole process resembles a highly trained military force or, in Nabel's happier analogy, a musical collaboration. And while it works beautifully most of the time, the immune system needs extra help against some diseases. "You literally have an immunologic orchestra," Nabel says, "and if the different sections don't come in in the proper sequence or are not harmonized in the proper way, you may end up with a piece that you're not very happy with...
...that can happen is if a bacterial or viral illness gets out of control before the immune system can respond. That's where vaccines come in. "What a vaccine does," says Nabel, "is alert these specialized cells that an incoming agent could be a problem, and allow the immune system to respond more quickly and effectively than if it had never seen the bug before." In effect, he says, "you move up the immunologic-response chain of events so the final, acquired response kicks in faster...
...early to know whether this strategy will work against HIV, but it is already working against another deadly virus. Ebola, though it has claimed far fewer victims than HIV, has enormous potential for devastation. There is no cure or vaccine for it--but in a recent trial, Nabel's group has shown that DNA priming can protect monkeys from Ebola...