AIDS Vaccine Gets Closer

[georgep77]

Hopefully !!!!!     

Rutgers AIDS researchers Gail Ferstandig Arnold and Eddy Arnold may have turned a corner in their search for a HIV vaccine. In a paper just published in the Journal of Virology, the husband and wife duo and their colleagues report on their research progress.
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With the support of the National Institutes of Health, the Arnolds and their team have been able to take a piece of HIV that is involved with helping the virus enter cells, put it on the surface of a common cold virus, and then immunize animals with it. They found that the animals made antibodies that can stop an unusually diverse set of HIV isolates or varieties.

Some researchers have previously been able to elicit effective antibodies, but usually only against a very limited number of HIV types. With HIV’s known propensity to mutate, antibodies developed against one local strain may not recognize and combat mutant varieties elsewhere. These geographic varieties with different mutations constitute one of the great challenges to finding a broad spectrum vaccine capable of protecting against the vast array of HIV varieties.

The approach taken by the Arnolds and their colleagues has been to identify a part of the AIDS virus that is crucial to its viability – something the virus needs in order to complete its life cycle – and then target this Achilles heel.

“The part that we targeted plays a role in the ability of HIV to enter cells, and is common to most HIV varieties,” Gail Ferstandig Arnold said. “That is a mechanism that would not be easy for the virus to reinvent on the fly, so it turns out to be a really helpful target.”

The Arnolds are both members of the Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine, a joint center of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. Also, Gail Ferstandig Arnold is a research professor and Eddy Arnold is a professor, both in Rutgers’ Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology.

While most vaccines are actually made from the pathogen itself, employing weakened or inactivated organisms to stimulate antibody production, HIV is just too dangerous to use as the basis for a vaccine vehicle. What the Arnolds have done is to use the relatively innocuous cold-causing rhinovirus and attach the target portion of the HIV. This must be done in a way that maintains the HIV part’s shape so that when the immune system sees it, it will actually mount an immune response as it would to the real HIV.

“The idea is to trick the immune system into thinking it is acting upon HIV before the virus shows actually shows up on the scene,” said Eddy Arnold.

To actually accomplish this is a big problem in engineering. The goal was to take a small piece of the HIV out of its native context, put it in a completely different system (rhinovirus), and have it look the same and act the same. Eddy Arnold likens this to taking the Rocky Mountains, putting them on India and having them look exactly right.

Using recombinant engineering, the research team developed a method to systematically test millions of varied presentations of the HIV segment with the rhinovirus. They tried millions of different variations on how to graft (or splice) one onto the other, creating what are called combinatorial libraries.

“It’s like the lottery,” Eddy Arnold commented. “The more tickets you buy the better chance you have of winning.”

“The really exciting part is that we were able to find viruses that could elicit antibodies against a huge variety of isolates of HIV. That is an immense step and a very important step,” said Gail Ferstandig Arnold.

“However, we need to be careful to not overstate things because the quantity of response is not huge, but it is significant,” added Eddy Arnold. “This is actually the first demonstration of this particular Achilles heel being presented in way to generate a relevant immune response. It is probably not potent enough by itself to be the vaccine or a vaccine, but it is a proof of principle that what we are trying to do is a very sound idea.”

Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090312114801.htm

[ginseng52]

Well I hope so.

[MYSTERY]

Hopefully someday we can all take a bite out of the carrot because we all sure been chasin' it around. 

[Inchlingblue]

It would be great if this has potential not only as a preventive vaccine but also a therapeutic one.

[hahaha]

It would be great if this has potential not only as a preventive vaccine but also a therapeutic one.

How can we tell , in a reasonable science way, this "potential" preventive vaccine can be or can not be turn into a therapeutic vaccine?

I know that once you produce antibody, it is meaningless to solicit same antibody again.  However, if this antigen is "new", would it be possible to solicit "new" kind of antibody?

Can someone explain to me?

 

[a2z]

It would be great if this has potential not only as a preventive vaccine but also a therapeutic one.

While I would love a therapeutic vaccine, I'd be happy if no one else got this damn disease.

[ronaldinho]

While I would love a therapeutic vaccine, I'd be happy if no one else got this damn disease.

I am with you. Even if did not have any therapeutical effects, The impact of an efficient preventive vaccine would be huge for HIV+ people, emotionally speaking. Once people can get an immunizing shot against HIV, the stigma and fear of the disease would diminish dramatically. No need for serosorting, no more questions, fears, suspicions, guilt....a whole new world indeed.

[dearestgrandson]

I think they are wasting their money looking for a vaccine when they should be looking for a cure.

An HIV Vaccine does nothing for those who are already infected. You can hope for a therapuetic vaccine, but no such vaccine exists for any disease so far so I wouldn't expect HIV to be the first one. Having a cure would cure those who are infected and make so that there is less of a possibility that those who are not infected will become infected since there will be fewer HIV+ people to infect them.

Something about searching for vaccine and not a cure for some reason smacks of religious fundamentalism to me. I can't quite put my finger on why, though. I can just see religious fundamentalists thinking that "fags" like my late grandson have already done it to themselves so why should they be helped? I don't know what it is, but....

HIV medications have huge limitations, also. Just because a person has an undetectable viral load does not mean that they are free from HIV related complications like HIV dementia. In my opinion, they are wasting their time and money looking for a vaccine when a cure would be much better.

BTW- How many "promising" avenues have there been in the past 27 years of HIV research? How many of them have ended up being worthless? What is the point of getting so excited about something that hasn't even made it to Phase 2 clinical trials yet? Call me a cynic, but I understand why my grandson was so depressed about being HIV+. All you have to do is read through Pubmed articles from the 1980's, 1990's, and early 2000's and see how many things seem like they were the next great thing and just never panned out.

[Inchlingblue]

BTW- How many "promising" avenues have there been in the past 27 years of HIV research? How many of them have ended up being worthless? What is the point of getting so excited about something that hasn't even made it to Phase 2 clinical trials yet? Call me a cynic, but I understand why my grandson was so depressed about being HIV+. All you have to do is read through Pubmed articles from the 1980's, 1990's, and early 2000's and see how many things seem like they were the next great thing and just never panned out.

Maybe there'll be both a vaccine and a cure? If you consider theories such as Raymond Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns, major advancements in technology (on every level) may be just around the proverbial corner. It's not a guarantee of course but neither is it "wishful thinking."  Kurzweil is no crackpot, he's a respected thinker.

"Kurzweil in his 2001 essay The Law of Accelerating Returns extends Moore's law to describe an exponential growth of technological progress. Moore's law describes an exponential growth pattern in the complexity of integrated semiconductor circuits. Kurzweil extends this to include technologies from far before the integrated circuit to future forms of technology. Whenever a technology approaches some kind of a barrier, according to Kurzweil, a new technology will be invented to allow us to cross that barrier. He cites numerous past examples of this to substantiate his assertions. He predicts that such paradigm shifts have and will continue to become increasingly common, leading to 'technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history.'. . . Already within the past sixty years, life in the industrialized world has changed almost beyond recognition except for living memories from the first half of the 20th century. This pattern will culminate in unimaginable technological progress in the 21st century, leading to a singularity. Kurzweil elaborates on his views in his books The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity Is Near." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Accelerating_Returns)

[a2z]

I think they are wasting their money looking for a vaccine when they should be looking for a cure.

An HIV Vaccine does nothing for those who are already infected.

Since I am one of the "already infected" I won't blow smoke up your ass and say I don't want a cure or that I am NOT worried about the effect of a preventative vaccine on research for a therapeutic one.  Because I do want a cure, and I do worry about the "vaccine race."

But I hardly think stopping this disease from being passed on is a "waste of money."  I don't to die.  I certainly don't want millions of others to die, or have to be tied to pills for the rest of their life either. 

[J220]

How can we tell , in a reasonable science way, this "potential" preventive vaccine can be or can not be turn into a therapeutic vaccine?

I know that once you produce antibody, it is meaningless to solicit same antibody again.  However, if this antigen is "new", would it be possible to solicit "new" kind of antibody?

Can someone explain to me?

 

As I understand it, the antibody response that all of us had upon infection was limited and flawed, as it were, in that it was elicited to attack a single portion of the virus that changed after the infection takes hold and integrates into the cell. So that initial response no longer works to clear the infection, merely to try to hold it at bay for a while.

But if I understand these news correctly, and the vaccine is eventually engineered to actually work in humans, the response to the introduction of the pathogen included in the vaccine will elicit a response that will be different than the one that occurred during our initial infection which was limited. This new response will be broadly neutralizing, and will - ostensibly- attack the critical part of the virus that is needed to reproduce in the body and/or infect new cells- the region of the virus that is its Achilles heel, as they refer to it.

So it would seem to me that if it works as a preventive vaccine, then at worst it will serve as a long-term/ permanent therapeutic vaccine, because whenever any infected cell in your body produces new copies of the virus, you will have a primed, effective antibody response to neutralize, kill/, or block the new virus copies from going about infecting other cells. See it as a SWAT team waiting outside the cell hideout to effectively kill off any virus that comes out. So even though technically we would be hiv-positive, it would be a latent, non-progressive condition.

At best, however, the new antibody response may be strong enough to actually go after individual infected cells and kill them off, clearing the infection from the body. This is our hope, of course, but who knows.

But as the article itself states, as important as this achievement is, it's mainly proof-of-concept at this stage, that it is possible to elicit a broadly-neutralizing response to the virus by attaching the target portion of hiv to a rhinovirus. And yes this needs plenty of time and testing and developing to see if it will have practical applications in humans.

But over all, what they have demonstrated is huge, an actual first, so although much work remains to be done, we can all celebrate this as the good news that it is. So cheers everybody!

[freewillie99]

But over all, what they have demonstrated is huge, an actual first, so although much work remains to be done, we can all celebrate this as the good news that it is. So cheers everybody!

Love this post.  Good on ya, J220!