Word: siv
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...study, scientists from Boston's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Tulane University tried to infect 15 sedated monkeys with SIV, the simian cousin of the AIDS virus. To simulate oral sex, researchers dribbled an SIV solution onto the tongues of seven animals. Then, for comparison, they carefully placed SIV in the rectums of eight other monkeys. Much to their surprise, they found that it took less of the viral solution to infect a monkey orally than rectally--6,000 times less...
...vaccine that can prevent infection altogether. And that's what makes the Sydney virus so promising--and so controversial. Could HIV itself, stripped of nef and adjacent sections of genetic material, provide the basis for such a vaccine, as Deacon and his colleagues cautiously suggest? Ongoing work on SIV, the simian immunodeficiency virus that causes an AIDS-like illness in monkeys, indicates that this might be less farfetched than it sounds. Ronald Desrosiers at the New England Regional Primate Research Center has demonstrated that when the nef gene is removed from SIV, the virus no longer has the power...
This makes vaccine development extremely risky. A weakened strain of SIV that protected adult monkeys, for example, looked safe until researchers at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston showed that newborn monkeys with immature immune systems did not respond as healthy adults do. All the young primates, in fact, developed the very disease the weakened virus was supposed to prevent. For this and a host of other reasons, most AIDS researchers argue that the only prudent strategy is to concoct a hybrid vaccine, putting the key features of a disabled AIDS virus into something more benign than a retrovirus...
...first known case of human infection with simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), a cousin of AIDS-causing HIV, has been documented in a laboratory worker. No one knows whether the virus, which isn't fatal in monkeys, will be deadly to humans, harmless or somewhere in between...
...Harvard researcher, Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics Ronald C. Desrosiers, has been trying to develop such an animal model in monkeys with SIV, a rough equivalent of HIV in the animals. Desrosiers has been able to delete certain portions of SIV to create a live but weakened form of the virus which won't cause disease. Despite initial success with the strategy, later results have been disappointing...