Antibody Kills 91% of HIV Strains
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
HIV has a few limits, firstly (I think) it only infects one type of cell (CD4 immune cells - white blood cells), secondly, it doesn't spread as easy as influenza, you need to exchange some bodily fluids with someone, preferably with an abundant supply of CD4 cells to infect. Since it generally requires sex to get HIV, if you knock out 91% of strains the other strains wont rush in to fill the vacuum.
The resistant strains already present will almost certainly increases as a proportion of the HIV population, its just natural selection. Use of condoms can prevent people from getting the resistant strains. Interestingly, male circumcision is also an excellent way to reduce chances of HIV infection because there will be less CD4 cells in your penis.
Plus, one of the big problems thus far have been we had NO IDEA how to attack the HIV bodies. Perhaps developing an understanding of this antibody will allow us to gain new understanding, and perhaps in good 'ol engineering tradition we will be able to change this, that, recompile, and cover a few more %. I know it's not that easy, but if you've ever developed code or hardware, having pre-existing, working models makes everything miles and miles easier.
That is inaccurate. Current antiviral agents remove most (as in over 90%) of the HIV viral particles from the blood of a patient. But then after weeks or months the viral load in blood is just as high. And any given patient has numerous strains within. Furthermore, most viral particles are not active: the virus saturates the immune system with defective particles (in a way it screens itself under noise). What's worse, HIV has long-term repositories like nervous system cells, from which particles are emitted at low rate. Killing your brain cells just to get rid of HIV defeats the purpose.
What this novel antibody will do is to remove 91% of the strains, meaning the remaining 9% will flourish enormously . RNA viruses mutate very fast and broadly (always being one step before crash-error).
What a good antibody can do is cut short the epidemics side of HIV: if a patient's HIV load is so low that it can't effectively and consistently pass on its infection to another person, the infection dies with the patient. This leads to a negative feedback loop that stops the epidemic. It's the same concept as vaccines: ensure that a sufficiently large proportion of the population is immune, so infections cannot spread when they inevitably appear in isolated individuals.
The problem with HIV is that every obvious way of attacking it seems to have some kind of drawback that's less than obvious. You can sit around and think up all kinds of hypothetical scenarios for attacking it and find that people have already tried that. And failed.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1496772
EDIT: sorry, I worded this terribly. What I meant was there are many people who would not catch HIV again, and thus would benefit from a cure to only 91% of HIV. The people who will continue being reckless and catch it again will, of course, not benefit from an antibody protecting them from only 91% of HIV, and that was what I was talking about when I referenced druggies. I'd be more than happy to give hardcore druggies a cure.
The whole point was not that some people deserve it and some don't, but that some will gain huge benefits even if it's only 91%, and that is why even though it's not 100% coverage it's still a plus. (of course, not everyone will, because some people will go and catch the other 9% right away, so for them it's not really a benefit, but SOME WILL BENEFIT)
EDIT2: to those of you still downvoting, are you trying to say you think every single person on the planet with AIDS would not catch it again if they were cured, but still vulnerable to some strains? That seems kind of unlikely.
edit: feel free to re-word it if you like, as long as you leave a note that you edited it.
That reminds me a lot of Good AIDS vs Bad AIDS from the British documentary satire Brass Eye (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFNs2mOkKzc)
That's a LOT easier said than done. There's a widely held belief in parts of the world (such as Africa) that having sex with a virgin cleanses one of AIDS. Because of this, child-rape is extremely prevalent in that part of the world. I suppose you could make the case that education is the easier part of solving the AIDS/HIV puzzle, but it's a very large behavioral problem that can not be solved using a scientific approach.
No doubt. It is a first step. Good news if clinical application follows from this finding.
As usual, I advise readers unfamiliar with Peter Norvig's article on reading scientific research reports
http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
to check that for issues that may not be fully explored by this mass media report.
Antibodies are built from heavy and light chains, which are in turn produced by a combinatorial recombination process: subunits get spliced together. While paternal B cells aren't going anywhere with regards to heritability, the heavy/light chain subunit repertoire is heritable! If Donor 45 is a mutant for one of those subunits, then the effect could very well be heritable.
edit: grammar.
Haha, maybe I should get go get an immunology text. I think I'm pushing the limits of Wikipedia.
There is also evidence that this antibody repertoire is further primed and refined by constant interaction with the incredible molecular diversity produced from the bacteria that live on our mucosa (that is, barrier interfaces with the environment like the lining of the gut and lungs and the skin).
The immune system naturally tweaks antibodies to make them more efficient at binding (Affinity maturation it's called). If you are trying to make a vaccine, you are better off starting off with an antibody which has already had all the hard work done on it.
It should be pointed out that the donor they used is actually infected with HIV, the antibody didn't protect him because prior to infection it wasn't affinity matured or present in high enough concentration.
If there was a heirarchy of medical treatments, vaccines would surely be at the top. A jab when you are too young to remember and suddenly debilitating fatal diseases that have plagued humans for thousands of years are no longer a problem. The immune system is unique in that you can give information to it, you can communicate with it. It's an information technology, actually. I think this is why vaccines are so fantastic, it is a treatment that collaborates with the body. Pretty much all other medical therapies involved taking a broken system and breaking it even more to achieve some kind of withered stability which is inevitability temporary and has consequences for the organism as a whole (eg giving steroids for rheumatoid arthritis, chemotherapy for cancer).
The seasonal flu vaccine is a global immune system in action. It's a molecular rss feed, an app update, a glycoprotein tweet whatever analogy you care to use, perhaps one day an individual's immune system will be part of a greater whole linked via information tech. The immune cloud it might be called.
And millions will still die because of war and poor sanitation and exploitation.
Yes, that would be horrible. Imagine a deadly virus which specifically infects immune cells to spread. We could call it something like Human Immunodeficiency Virus.
To my knowledge, there is not a repertoire of antibodies that are automatically produced, per se.
Seriously: Is the distinction that relevant?
On the other hand, the antibody would never have been noticed if we hadn't been spending all this money on research.
Indeed. But, even though he is a homosexual man, the gene would likely be passed along eventually, and run its course through the human race (if we believe Darwin). We just don't want to wait that long.
note: it would be passed one of a few ways:
1) his ancestors also had the gene, and he's not the only one to get it. He has heterosexual relatives who will pass it along, and they simply weren't found for one reason or another.
2) he wavers in his homosexuality, and passes his gene along to a few women OR he is bisexual
3) he donates sperm
4) it happens again in a heterosexual person. This gene arose in something like 30-40 years (I'm not really sure just how many) since the beginning of AIDS, which is an evolutionary blink. I think it's not unreasonable to figure it would arise again, and that it wouldn't take a bajillion years
Still, the fact that it was already floating around I feel proves my point even more. If the disease ravaged us for hundreds of centuries before this cropped up, THEN it'd be pretty reasonable to say it's highly unlikely to develop again anytime soon.
Most HIV people get infected by one strain, but it mutates so rapidly that in a single individual, multiple strains co exist at different levels (a major one and many, many lower levels ones).