Word: viruses
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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...
...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...
...sure, creating an effective vaccine from the Rockefeller scientists' research will not be easy, and it 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...
...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...
...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...