Novel Approach to Fight HIV may Help in Development of Vaccine

A new way of fighting HIV by preventing shape-shifting in an important segment of protein from HIV, may help prime the immune system to develop antibodies against the virus, and pave the way for the development of an AIDS vaccine.

Such antibodies, elicited against specific protein segments, could one day serve as the basis for a vaccine to fight many different strains of HIV or other swiftly mutating viruses.

About AIDS
"AIDS is an epidemic disease, a potentially preventable, deadly infection for which there is no cure, no vaccine, and it is not under control." - National Commission on AIDS, 1993.

Although a small percentage of individuals infected with HIV develop 'broadly neutralizing antibodies' that disarm different strains of the virus, researchers have so far been unable to develop a vaccine that coaxes the immune system into making such antibodies.

To get around this problem, researchers have tried to extract a key bit of protein - or epitope - that a neutralizing antibody recognizes, in the hope that the immune system will react more strongly to the epitope in isolation.

However, without the rest of the protein to hold it in place, the segment generally loses its recognizable stable structure.

About AIDS - Health Education
Encyclopedia section of medindia gives general info about AIDS information and health education.

Now, scientists in the United States have devised a computer model for identifying a protein that could serve as a type of scaffold, locking an epitope into the structure to which a neutralizing antibody can bind.

"We've figured out how to pull out those snippets, retain their structure, and teach the immune system to recognize them," Nature quoted Peter Kwong, a structural biologist at the National Institute of Allergy, as saying.

AIDS Drug Could Also Help Prevent Herpes Virus
A drug approved in 2007 for the treatment of AIDS- raltegravir or Isentress-could also play a role in preventing the herpes virus, found a new study.

The researchers tested the approach on an epitope of gp41, a protein on the surface of HIV that helps the virus to invade and infect host cells.

The epitope is recognized by an antibody called 2F5, which can neutralize several strains of the virus.

Nearly Half of US Gays Unaware of Their HIV Infection
One in five gay men living in 21 major US cities are infected with the AIDS virus and nearly half are unaware of it, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in a study.

After extracting the epitope from the virus, the researchers transplanted the epitope onto a protein with a complementary structure that acted as the scaffold.

The immune systems of guinea pigs injected with this scaffold-epitope complex developed antibodies very similar in structure to 2F5 antibodies.

The study has been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Source-ANI