Big News on the HIV Front

"Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and colleagues in the United Kingdom have engineered T cells able to recognize HIV-1 strains that have evaded the immune system. The findings of the study, published online in the journal Nature Medicine, have important implications for developing new treatments for HIV, especially for patients with chronic infection who fail to respond to antiretroviral regimens." -Science Daily

A cure? No. Hope? Yeah, definitely.

You can check out the full story on Science Daily. You may have heard that in the last year testing for a potential HIV vaccine from Merck (who, for better or for worse, my brother acutally lobbies for) failed. In human trials the vaccine failed miserably, acutally making a subgroup of the subjects more vulnerable to HIV. Like many vaccines, Merck's vaccine, V520, used a few weakened human immunodeficiency viruses- none of which were strong enough to infect a person- delivered via a virus that usually causes the common cold. The idea behind this (and vaccines in general) is that once the body sees the human immunodeficiency virus it will be prepared to deal with it if someone is infect in the future. The problem, many researchers suspect, may have been in the use of the common cold virus to deliver the vaccine, which many people had already encountered in everyday life. In face of huge disappointment the trials were, rightly, stopped. And, until a few hours ago, that's about where the world stood on a HIV vaccine...

This new research does not prevent the acquisition of HIV, but drastically reduced the levels of the virus in monkeys and prevented the progression of HIV to AIDS. In case that is confusing- HIV, human immunodeficiency virus, is a virus, the infection. Once the virus is in your system, it slowly begins to kill off a person's T Cells, which are critical for a healthy immune system. With an immune system practically wiped out, HIV then turns into AIDS, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, which basically means your body is incredibly weak and starts being attacked by all sorts of opportunistic infections it would otherwise be able to fight off. This is a large part of the reason HIV is so dangerous, someone could be HIV+ for years and spreading the virus without knowing until they become sick as many as ten years later. Antiretroviral drugs are currently used to help keep the virus in check, but not everyone responds to antiretroviral drugs, and people often need to switch drugs as the lose their effectiveness. A new preventivie treatement (which this is not, but could help develop) triggering a natural immune response when an individual is exposed to HIV would have amazing implications.

This is, by no means, a cure of the end of the fight agains HIV. 2 million people still died of AIDS last year and there are currently over 11 million children orphaned by AIDS in Africa alone. But this is defiantely potentially very good news.