Posted 09.10.2012 at 1:00 pm
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Attempts to create a vaccine for HIV have failed time and again partly because no one has been able to achieve the right vaccine balance — one that can spur the body into action, but not make a person sick. A new study in monkeys suggests a new solution: Vaccines could be more effective if they can be made to linger in the body.
Most vaccines work by introducing the body to a virus so it can build up defenses to fight off the invader. This works in one of two ways: Either the vaccines introduce a live, but modified, version of a virus — like the nasal-spray flu vaccine — or they introduce an inactivated version, which can still be enough to turn on the immune system.
In the early 1990s, researchers saw some promise with a slightly weakened version of simian immunodeficiency virus, the monkey equivalent of HIV. It conferred protection in some monkeys who were then exposed to the fully potent version of SIV. But other monkeys still developed full-blown AIDS, so the treatment was never considered safe enough to test on people. Researchers at Oregon Health & Science University set out to determine how this vaccine worked. They found that viral protection stemmed from T-cells (immune cells) that were maintained in the lymph nodes.
The takeaway: An HIV vaccine might have to persist in the body in order to work well. This might be possible by modifying other, less harmful viruses to perk up the T-cells, so that they’re constantly on the alert, the study authors say. The paper is published online in Nature Medicine.
[via ScienceDaily]
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Considering that the AIDS/HIV vector requires you to physically put part of one person into another (blood or other select fluid) - there really is no reason to even need a cure.
A simple quarenteen would (and could) have solved the disease several times over.
A cure would not do any good (STDs with cures still exist in droves). A vaccine would normally be eschewed by all except those at high risk (many of whom would have already been repeatedly exsposed).
One generation of quarenteen, however, would end the disease with minimal cost. If a cure could then be developed, it would administered in a means that would actually be effective.
I don't think its possible to quarantine 35 million people for the rest of their lives.
I am with tritc on this one. That would be completely inhumane.
My heart goes out to those who suffer, their family and friends. I keep them all in my prayers.
US Patent 5676977 tetrasilver tetroxide molecular crystal devices / read it!
To be up to date HIV can be rendered, with drugs, to such a low viral load as to make it unable to be transmitted. A drastic strategy of quarantine or hysterical avoidance is no longer even rational. The article is saying that, vaccines may only need to be prolonged in the body possible by use of bioplastic timed delivery, or the use of hydrogel to do the same.
Hydrogels may prove to be the next super element of the decade. Because they can be as heat shielding in biological and industrial 3d printing. To print organs they could hold scaffolding, and stem cells for vasculature to form in the body. While at the same time used to 3d printing between bioplastic and human cells to create the complex vasculature in a 3d organ. The bioplastic viens dissolves over years and the hydrogel will be replaced with veins. That’s the concept.
In industrial application entire parts are formed plastic and hard metal because the hydrogel provides heat shielding the gel is dissolved away leavening a completed part. Hydrogel may even prove to be the substance of the decade by beating HIV.