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Human Test: Novel Vaccine Stops HIV

Treatment Turns On Anti-HIV Immunity, Holds AIDS Virus in Check

By Daniel DeNoon
WebMD Medical News Reviewed By Charlotte Grayson, MD
on Monday, November 29, 2004

Nov. 29, 2004 -- It worked in mice. It worked in monkeys. And now in humans, a therapeutic vaccine has stopped HIV in its tracks.

The vaccine is made from a patient's own dendritic cells and HIV isolated from the patient's own blood. Dendritic cells are crucial to the immune response. They grab foreign bodies in the blood and present them to other immune cells to trigger powerful immune system responses to destroy the foreign invaders.

HIV infection normally turns these important immune system responses off. But animal studies show that when dendritic cells are "loaded" with whole, killed AIDS viruses, they can trigger effective immune responses that keep infected animals from dying of AIDS.

Wei Lu, Jean-Marie Andrieu, and colleagues at the University of Paris in France and Pernambuco Federal University in Recife, Brazil, tested the vaccine on 18 Brazilian patients. All had HIV infection for at least a year. Their T-cell counts -- a crucial measure of AIDS progression -- were dropping, meaning their disease was worsening. None was taking anti-HIV medications.

After getting three under-the-skin injections of the tailor-made vaccine, the amount of HIV in the patients' blood (called the viral load) dropped by 80%. After a year, eight of the 18 patients still had a 90% drop in HIV levels. All patients' T-cell counts stopped dropping.

The findings appear in the December issue of Nature Medicine.

"The results suggest that [these] vaccines could be a promising strategy for treating people with chronic HIV infection," Andrieu and colleagues write. "The significant decrease of viral load as well as maintenance of ... [T-]cell counts observed at one year after immunization are particularly promising."

The researchers warn that their study is only proof of principle. It's still not clear which patients do best with the vaccine, although there's evidence that vaccination should be given as soon after HIV infection as possible. Only clinical trials comparing people who get the vaccine to those who don't can show whether this vaccine really is an effective AIDS therapy.

Similar approaches are being explored for the treatment of cancer and long-term viral infections such as hepatitis C.

ronson · Novice Joined: 03 Feb 2005 Posts: 20 Location:

I think it would be great if they found a cure for AIDS. Stepping out of my usual optimistic roll however, I fear that won't happen in our life time. It's sad, but they've been working on one for years with no success. Is there more to this article? I'd like to read more about this.
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Alan Stepney · Centurion Joined: 05 Nov 2004 Posts: 853 Location:

I tend to agree with you, but let's hope we are both being too pessimistic and they do find a cure.

Mike · Site Admin Joined: 07 Sep 2004 Posts: 4512 Location:

ronson · Novice Joined: 03 Feb 2005 Posts: 20 Location:

True, because just like anything else in the circle of life; it's survival of the fittest. Nature has a way of "weeding" and thinning things out, so that things don't become over populated. If that happened, we'd ALL die.
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21yearsinthai · Cohort Joined: 08 Sep 2004 Posts: 315 Location:

altyfc · Posted: Fri Apr 01, 2005 5:33 pm Post subject: