Word: virus
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...excitement over those advances, however, has been tempered by the still raw memories of a humbling retreat in 2007, after a highly anticipated shot against the virus was deemed a failure. While nobody expected spectacular results, neither did anyone expect such a stunning defeat, and the scientific community is still struggling to recover from it. "We are still a long ways away from having an effective HIV vaccine that physicians can reach into the cabinet and pull out in a vial and inject into a person," says Dr. Bruce Walker, an HIV expert at Harvard Medical School...
That may be true, but Ho, who has been working to develop an HIV vaccine of his own, now believes that a traditional shot, one that relies on snippets of a virus to both awaken and prod the immune system to churn out antibodies, may not be the best way to fight HIV. Rather than expecting the body to do all the work of first recognizing then mounting an attack against the virus, why not just present the body with a ready-made arsenal of antibodies that can home in on HIV? It's the immunological equivalent of a frozen...
...preoccupation with HIV only grew as the virus continued to baffle scientists. Expecting the unexpected was the best way to confront HIV, he soon learned, and he quickly amassed an impressive array of scientific firsts in the field. As director of ADARC, which was founded in 1991 and was one of the first research centers dedicated solely to the study of AIDS, he led a team that pioneered the "hit 'em early and hit 'em hard" approach to drug therapy, now the core of the ARV-cocktail treatment that is keeping millions of HIV-positive patients alive. His lab showed...
...vaccine was proving nearly impossible. Despite all that they have learned about HIV, experts are still missing one essential ingredient: to this day, they do not know exactly what cells or immune responses could protect the body from HIV infection. Could an antibody that binds to and neutralizes the virus do the trick? Are T cells, specially formulated to recognize portions of HIV's surface proteins, the solution? Or, as many experts now suspect, is some elusive combination of those factors the key to outwitting HIV? (See TIME's photo-essay "Access to Life...
Without an answer, developing vaccines is a very halting process. "The virus is a moving target," says Dr. Gary Nabel, director of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). "It is constantly changing its genetic makeup through mutations. It's also a moving target because the proteins of the virus surface are actually moving themselves - they are conformationally flexible. The net result is that the immune system never gets a really good look at them...