ScienceDaily News Release: Body's Own Antibodies May Drive New Strains Of HIV: Scientists in California have provided the first detailed look at how human antibodies, proteins critical for the body's defense against invading pathogens, may actually drive human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) to mutate and escape detection by the immune system. The findings, reported online March 18 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may be key in efforts to develop an effective AIDS vaccine. A team led by Douglas D. Richman, MD, a virologist and physician with the Veterans Affairs (VA) San Diego Healthcare System and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine, found that patients infected with HIV rapidly develop a strong antibody response against the virus. But the same antibodies tasked with recognizing and disabling the germ appear to force its ongoing evolution into new strains that dance around the antibody response and continue to replicate.
Of course, that would also seem to indicate that unless vaccines can use some sort of rotating approach, they will eventually be useless against the virus, even within the same person. After all, if the virus changes to outpace the antibody response, then accelerating the antibody response may well simply accelerate the rate of HIV development. A vaccine might only prevent infection for a short time.
Well, there's a nice depressing thought for the day.
Posted by iain at March 19, 2003 03:58 PMComments
