Tag: HIV/AIDS

A team of labs at Caltech and UCLA decided to “short-circuit” the need for a vaccination, or even antibody-producing immune cells:

They created a disarmed adenovirus that contained the genes needed to produce a broadly effective antibody from humans, optimizing the DNA to make sure that the antibody was made in muscle cells, and then secreted into their environment.

The modified virus was then injected into mice that had had their immune systems humanized (the stem cells in their bone marrow were killed off and then repopulated with human cells).

The mice were then exposed to levels of HIV many times higher than are normally present during initial infections. Not all antibodies effectively blocked new infections, but at least one did so consistently. The resistance to new HIV infections persisted for the life of the experiments.

Good news. Of course, it goes without saying that this new approach will take years – with solid progress – to reach any public usage IF it works out that the idea is transferable to human.

Keep your fingers crossed.

As scientists struggle to find a vaccine to prevent infection with the AIDS virus, a study in mice suggests hope for a new approach — one that doctors now want to test in people.

The treated mice in the study appeared to have 100 percent protection against HIV. That doesn’t mean the strategy will work in people. But several experts were impressed.

“This is a very important paper (about) a very creative idea,” says the government’s AIDS chief, Dr. Anthony Fauci. He didn’t take part in the research.

The new study involved injecting mice with a protective gene, an idea that’s been tested against HIV infection in animals for a decade.

In the nearly 30 years since HIV was identified, scientists haven’t been able to find a vaccine that is broadly effective. One boost came in 2009, when a large study in Thailand showed that an experimental vaccine protected about a third of recipients against infection. That’s not good enough for general use, but researchers are now trying to improve it.

The mouse work is reported by David Baltimore and colleagues at the California Institute of Technology.

Baltimore’s team used a harmless virus to carry an antibody gene and injected it once into a leg muscle. The researchers found that the mice made high levels of the antibody for more than a year. The results suggest lifetime protection for a mouse, Baltimore said, although “we simply don’t know what will happen in people.”

If all goes well, a preliminary experiment to test the safety of the approach might begin in about a year, he said. Baltimore said his group is also planning human experiments that he hopes will start in the next couple years.

More at Yahoo News

Researchers at the Spanish Superior Scientific Research Council (CSIC) have successfully completed Phase I human clinical trials of a HIV vaccine that came out with top marks after 90% of volunteers developed an immunological response against the virus.

The MVA-B vaccine draws on the natural capabilities of the human immune system and “has proven to be as powerful as any other vaccine currently being studied, or even more”, says Mariano Esteban, head researcher from CSIC’s National Biotech Centre.
The trial demonstrated how the vaccine stimulates the production of lymphocytes B, which produces HIV attacking antibodies that block the virus from infecting healthy cells.

“MVA-B immune profile meets, initially, the requirements for a promising HIV vaccine,” says Esteban. Although it does not remove the virus from the body, the immune response induced by the vaccine could keep the virus under control by destroying the infected cell.

According to CSIC, “if this genetic cocktail passes Phase II and Phase III future clinic trials, and makes it into production, in the future HIV could be compared to herpes virus nowadays”.

Phase I clinic trials will also commence with HIV infected volunteers to test its efficiency as a therapeutic vaccine.

Read more at gizmag.com

Almost 20 years after he became infected, Timothy Brown is, essentially, cured of AIDS.

Brown, now 45, is known in medical-journal circles as “The Berlin Patient,” a moniker assigned him by a February 2009 case study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

In a “Brief Report,” oncologist Gero Huetter and his colleagues at Berlin’s University Hospital described the unique stem-cell transplant of an HIV-infected patient — Brown — who had acute myeloid leukemia, and the remarkable result: Twenty months after the procedure, the virus had not reappeared in Brown’s body, even though he was no longer taking antiretroviral drugs.

The bone marrow Brown received in a time-tested treatment for leukemia also transferred to Brown’s immune system an uncommon genetic variation — present in an estimated 10% of northern Europeans — that rendered it resistant to HIV.

When he learned he was HIV-positive in 1995, a friend told him gravely that he probably had two years to live.

Ten years later, he was alive and taking antiretroviral medications. Then, in 2006, a bout of exhaustion sent him to the doctor, who diagnosed leukemia and proposed the customary treatment: Wipe out Brown’s immune system with radiation and rebuild it with the bone marrow of a healthy donor.

From the 230 possible matches found for Brown, Dr. Huetter deliberately picked a donor who carried genetic resistance to HIV, hoping they might lick both diseases in a single shot.

Now living in San Francisco, Brown has found himself a bit of a celebrity at AIDS functions around the city. Two weeks ago, he spoke at an event titled “Cure — Still a Four-Letter Word?” organized by the American Foundation for AIDS Research. Afterward, he says, “everybody wanted to get their picture taken with me.”

Certainly, the treatment Brown received could not be applied to the millions of people infected with HIV — it is far too risky and expensive for that. But its results offer proof that there are ways to turbo-charge the immune system to prevent and even fight off established infection without taking a cocktail of pills everyday, the officials wrote in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Read more at LATimes.com