A New Vaccine That Can Block HIV

Researchers at various reserach institutes has been working and successful in finding out a dru that can work against HIV virus and immune against it. The drug has worked against doses of HIV that were higher than transmitted between humans, and works for at least eight months after injection.

A new drug led by the team of researchers at Scripps Research Institute in the US, is found to be effective against doses of HIV-1, HIV-2 and SIV (simian immunodeficiency virus) that have been extracted from humans - including what researchers consider to be the ‘hardest-to-stop’ variants.

"Our compound is the broadest and most potent entry inhibitor described so far,” lead researcher Michael Farzan from the Scripps Institute said in a press release. "Unlike antibodies, which fail to neutralise a large fraction of HIV-1 strains, our protein has been effective against all strains tested, raising the possibility it could offer an effective HIV vaccine alternative.”

HIV infects a person by infecting his T lymphocyte, a type of white blood cells and injecting his own genetic material into to tranform it to HIV producing machine, thus making our immune acts against us.

The team has discovered that a particular type of protein found on the surface of white blood cells can actually bind to the surface of the HIV virus in two different places simultaneously, which means that not only does the virus no longer have a chance to change the position of its receptors to escape, it’s also being blocked from entering the T lymphocyte cells.

"When antibodies try to mimic the receptor, they touch a lot of other parts of the viral envelope that HIV can change with ease," said one of the team, Matthew Gardner, from the Scripps Institute. "We've developed a direct mimic of the receptors without providing many avenues that the virus can use to escape, so we catch every virus thus far.”

"We are closer than any other approach to universal protection, but we still have hurdles, primarily with safety for giving it to many, many people,” Franzen told the BBC. One such concern is that no one really knows what the long-term implications would be for a person who is having an anti-HIV response being pumped around their body non-stop. The team will be looking into this when they get their human trials underway.

source: Sciencealert

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