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04.30.2013

AIDS vaccine fails

Scanning electron micrograph of HIV-1 budding (in green) from cultured lymphocyte

The past two weeks brought plenty of interesting science news, including the failure of a potential AIDS vaccine. From Popular Science:

The study, called HVTN-505, was begun in 2009, over the years enrolling over 2,500 volunteers. The vaccination process doesn’t actually involve any live or even deactivated HIV; instead, it starts with one that includes genetic material that’s simply modeled after the virus, to prime the immune system. Then comes the real vaccine, involving recombinant DNA (meaning, DNA from various sources) based on adenovirus type 5, a common cold virus that in this case has been disabled so it doesn’t actually cause a cold. Attached to those adenoviruses are artificial versions of HIV antigens. Antigens–the term is short for antibody generator–trigger an immune response, and these artificial antigens were designed to attack the three major HIV subtypes.

This technique had shown some mild success before; in a study in Thailand in 2009, it showed a 31 percent reduction in the HIV infection rate, which sounds good to me, but is apparently not enough to really do more than encourage further research. Unfortunately, that was as much success as this strategy ever saw.

03.04.2013

baby cured of HIV

HIV medications

A baby, born in Mississippi 2.5 years ago appears to have been cured of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. She is the first child, and only the second person ever, to have been thought to be cured of the infection. The cure was acheived thanks to an aggressive and early treatment with antiretroviral drugs just 30 hours after she was born. From NPR:

Gay decided to begin treating the child immediately, with the first dose of antivirals given within 31 hours of birth. That’s faster than most infants born with HIV get treated, and specialists think it’s one important factor in the child’s cure.

In addition, Gay gave higher-than-usual, “therapeutic” doses of three powerful HIV drugs rather than the “prophylactic” doses usually given in these circumstances.

Over the months, the baby thrived, and standard tests could detect no virus in her blood, which is the normal result from antiviral treatment.

Doctors then lost track of the baby for several months, as the mother went through “life changes.” But when they regained contact with the child, it showed a surprising lack of HIV virus. Again from NPR:

Gay expected to find that the child’s blood was teeming with HIV. But to her astonishment, tests couldn’t find any virus.

“My first thought was, ‘Oh, my goodness, I’ve been treating a child who’s not actually infected,’ ” Gay says. But a look at the earlier blood work confirmed the child had been infected with HIV at birth. So Gay then thought the lab must have made a mistake with the new blood samples. So she ran those tests again.

The results of this isolated event are prompting researchers to begin planning studies on whether this early and aggressive treatment can be more widely applied. It would have huge implications for AIDS treatment in the developing world where many children are infected with HIV during birth.

Also see coverage at the New York Times.

03.17.2012

does psoriasis help protect from HIV?

According to a recent report by Haoyan Chen et al. in  Public Library of Science Genetics, it might.

From Charles Q Choi at Scientific American:

Researchers had noticed that some psoriasis patients had the same gene variants as people known as “HIV-1 controllers.” Such people have HIV-1, but they naturally maintain low levels of the virus and generally do not develop any obvious symptoms of AIDS.

To investigate further, scientists looked at more than 1,700 psoriasis patients and nearly 3,600 people who don’t have it. People who have psoriasis were significantly more likely to have the gene variants known to defend against HIV-1 and delay its progression to AIDS.

These findings suggest that psoriasis is a malfunction of antiviral gene variants that ordinarily protect us against disease.

 

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