Showing posts with label vaccines. Show all posts
Showing posts with label vaccines. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

New Approach to Blocking HIV Raises Talk of an AIDS Vaccine


Wow. I'd kind of thought a vaccine wasn't even being discussed anymore.

The New York Times reports:
A new compound has blocked H.I.V. infection so well in monkeys that it may be able to function as a vaccine against AIDS, the scientists who designed it reported Wednesday. H.I.V. has defied more than 30 years of conventional efforts to fashion a vaccine. The new method stimulates muscle cells to produce proteins that somewhat resemble normal antibodies, which have Y-shaped heads. These proteins have both a head and a tail, and they use them to simultaneously block two sites on each “spike” that the virus uses to attach itself to a cell. If both sites can be blocked on every spike, the virus becomes helpless and drifts off unattached into eventual oblivion by the immune system.
Read HERE.