Papers Add New Knowledge On HIV's Infection Tactics.(Brief Article)

2001 DEC 5 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- In its November 2001 issue, Nature Medicine published three papers that represent great advances in the fight against HIV.

The first describes a strategy that could be developed to yield an effective vaccine against the disease. The other two papers describe previously unknown molecular mechanisms that explain why HIV is so successful at infecting human cells.

One principle of creating a vaccine is to identify a protein section (epitope) of the pathogen causing disease and to inoculate the body in advance with this epitope so that it raises antibodies to that protein, thus destroying the invading pathogen when it is encountered. However, HIV is a rapidly mutating virus and exists in several different forms, or clades. Thus, efforts to make a vaccine against HIV have floundered because identifying a suitable epitope that can generate antibodies that will attach all forms of the virus has not been possible.

Now, a team lead by Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Giuseppe Scala, have identified epitopes that correspond to a range of HIV clades. Fauci's team injected macaque monkeys with these epitopes and found that they were protected from subsequent challenge by the simian counterpart of HIV - SHIV. The next step would be to extend these trials to humans.

In a separate paper, Andreas Baur and colleagues at the University of Erlangen, Germany, have discovered that a key protein in HIV called nef, is highly skilled at protecting the ...