Because it was so Since it was first identified in 1983, HIV has 85 million people And around 40 million people died worldwide.
A drug known as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) greatly reduces the risk of HIV infection, but must be taken daily to be effective. A vaccine that provides lasting protection has eluded researchers for decades. Now, there may finally be a viable strategy for making it.
An experimental vaccine developed at Duke University triggered an elusive type of broadly neutralizing antibodies in a small number of people enrolled in a 2019 clinical trial. It was discovered that Published today in a scientific magazine cell.
“This is one of the most important studies in the field of HIV vaccines to date,” said HIV expert and president and chief executive officer of the South African Medical Research Council, who was not involved in the study. says Glenda Gray.
Several years ago, a team at the Scripps Research Institute and the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) showed that it is possible to: Stimulate necessary progenitor cells This is because people’s bodies create these rare antibodies. Duke’s research goes a step further and produces these antibodies, albeit at low levels.
“This is a scientific feat and gives the field great hope that we can build HIV vaccine formulations that induce immune responses along the pathways necessary for protection,” Gray said.
Vaccines work by training the immune system to recognize viruses and other pathogens. They introduce something that resembles a virus, such as a part of a virus or a weakened version of a virus, which in turn prompts the body’s B cells to produce protective antibodies against the virus. These antibodies persist so that when a person later encounters the real virus, the immune system remembers it and is ready to attack.
Researchers were able to produce a vaccine for Covid-19 in a matter of months, but producing a vaccine for HIV has proven much more difficult. The problem is the unique nature of viruses. Because HIV mutates rapidly, it can quickly defeat immune defenses. It also integrates into the human genome within days of exposure and hides it from the immune system.
“Some viruses resemble our own cells, and we don’t like to make antibodies against ourselves,” said Burton Haynes, director of the Duke Human Vaccine Institute and one of the study’s authors. To tell.
The particular antibodies that researchers are interested in are known as broadly neutralizing antibodies, which can recognize and block different versions of the virus. Due to the shape-shifting nature of HIV, there are two main types of HIV, each with several strains. An effective vaccine would need to target many of them.
Some people with HIV develop broadly neutralizing antibodies, but this often takes years of living with HIV, Haynes says. Still, people aren’t taking enough of them to fight the virus. These special antibodies are made by her B cells, which are rare and have mutations acquired over time in response to changing viruses in the body. “These are strange antibodies,” Haynes said. “The body doesn’t produce them easily.”
