A team of scientists on a quest for an antibody-based AIDS vaccine have said that they found promising signs in an unusually robust natural immune response of a patient in Africa. Through studying a number of blood samples over the three-year period after the sufferer was infected, researchers watched a microscopic battle between the virus and antibodies. Both evolved as they sought to gain the upper hand.
In an important breakthrough, for the first time, scientists were able to follow the full chain of events that led to the patient naturally producing the antibodies which attacks different strains of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS.
This research has the potential to fill a gap in current scientific knowledge, which has been a roadblock on the path to an effective vaccine for the virus, which has already been responsible for more than 30 million deaths.
Antibodies could be considered to be the foot soldiers of your immune system. They latch onto viruses or other microbe-sized intruders into the body and tag them to be destroyed by other cells in the immune system. Most antiviral vaccines are made by priming antibodies to recognise specific germs more easily, but an effective method of doing this has not yet been successful in AIDS control.
One of the biggest problems for medical scientists and researchers, the HIV virus typically evolves too fast to ever be left open to antibody attack. The individual who is in the study, from an African country that was not specified, is one of around 20 percent of HIV-infected people whose immune systems naturally produce antibodies.
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