New Angle on HIV / AIDS
Scientists are now trying to work around direct attacks on AIDS that don't seem to be working and focusing on a new method of inserting a gene into the muscle that can cause it to produce protective antibodies against HIV / AIDS. The new method has worked in ice and now has also proven successful in monkeys. The Nature Medicine Journals online edition has a story on this same possible breakthrough. There is a team of researchers at a Children's Hospital in Philadelphia that consider this a real possibility, although they agree that much testing is still applicable before a product is ready for human use.
Every angle possible should be utilized for eradicating this disease and this new research may well be the light at the end of the tunnel for millions waiting for and hoping for help. There are over 33 million people living with HIV today, with 56,000 new cases reported annually just in the United States.
Most efforts at blocking AIDS have sought to stimulate the body's immune system to produce antibodies that fight the disease. This approach has worked for diseases like measles and smallpox, however it hasn't done well with HIV / AIDS.
This team however took a different approach. They used what they cal a leapfrog strategy, bypassing the natural immune system response that was the target of all previous HIV and SIV vaccine candidates. The closely related Simian virus, or SIV, affects monkeys. The researchers knew there wer proteins that could neutralize the HIV virus, so they began thinking about whether they could use them to fight the disease.
In a ten year long effort the team developed immunoadhesins, antibody like proteins designed to attach to SIV and block it from infecting cells.
Read more at Johnson Research Laboratory...
