Word: viruses
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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...
...optimism - about how to find the holy grail of AIDS research. Their approach to vaccine development, outlined online on March 15 in the journal Nature, is to abandon the as yet fruitless search for a magic bullet - which zeros in on just a single target to halt the virus - and instead try to mimic the body's natural, if rare and more diffuse, defense against the virus...
...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...
...effective, but getting vaccinated gives you a good chance of lessening your symptoms--and thus your infectiousness--should you get slammed with the oseltamivir-resistant strain. There's also hope that a promising antibody--which researchers discovered in February--that binds to a nonmutating part of the virus could one day provide lifetime protection in a single shot against practically all versions of the flu. No more annual flu vaccine and no more worries about the next pandemic. Until then, we just have to hope that the virus doesn't evolve too far ahead of our ability to keep...