HIV vaccine possibility following study of 'antibodies with loops'

A new study suggests it may be possible to induce a rapid anti-HIV immune response in unexposed people by developing a vaccine that triggers antibodies containing loop-like structures.
HIV attacking cells
The immune system is naturally capable of making antibodies against HIV, but it takes a year to reach full production.
The finding could provide a much-needed boost to HIV vaccine research, where efforts to jumpstart an effective immune response to HIV have so far met with little success.

In a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN, explain how the immune system is naturally capable of making antibodies against HIV.

However, it takes a year for the body to reach full production of these "broadly neutralizing" antibodies, and less than a third of people produce them anyway.

The team decided to explore features of the antibodies that make them particularly deadly to HIV and manipulate them in order to understand what it might take for a vaccine to trigger them.

Their study was done in three phases: identification, optimization and re-engineering. First, they identified the key elements of the features (loop-like structures of amino acids), then they investigated the optimum arrangement of the loops for binding to HIV, and finally, they fused them onto a natural antibody and tested the result.





source:medical news today