New antibodies equal big advance for creating AIDS vaccine

American researchers are one step closer to developing a vaccine against the deadly AIDS virus.

Government scientists discovered three potent antibodies – including one that neutralizes more than 91% of HIV strains – in cells of a 60-year-old African American gay man dubbed Donor 45, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The man's body made the antibodies naturally.

Researchers are now hoping to create a vaccine that would allow anyone's body to make those antibodies. The research could pave the way to create vaccines that would be effective not just against the AIDS virus but other viral illnesses as well.

Coming up with a vaccine "will require work," Gary Nabel, who directs the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told the Wall Street Journal.

Added Nabel, who was a leader of the research, "We're going to be at this for awhile," before any benefits are apparent. Vaccines, thought to work by turning on the body's own ability to make antibodies, have been an important part of AIDS research.

Last year, the first HIV vaccine to show any effectiveness proved to be a disappointment. Success rates on that vaccine, following a trial in Thailand, ranged from statistically insignificant to 30%. But the discovery of these new antibodies may yield a more promising treatment.

"The antibodies attach to a virtually unchanging part of the virus, and this explains why they can neutralize such an extraordinary range of HIV strains," Dr. John Mascola, a study researcher, said in a statement, according to AOL News.

Turning the discovery of the antibodies into an effective HIV vaccine would be difficult, since researchers would have to zero in on a crucial part of the virus that the antibodies fasten onto, and then design a vaccine using that viral part to prod the body to make the antibodies found in Donor 45.

The new discovery, described in the online edition of the journal Science, comes just days before a large International AIDS Conference in Vienna.

Prevention science is expected to be the focus at the meeting. More than 33 million people had HIV at the end of 2008, according to United Nations estimates reported in the Wall Street Journal, and some 2.7 came down with the virus that same year.

In the case of Donor 45, whose antibodies did not save him from getting HIV, researchers screened some 25 million of his cells to find the dozen that produced the powerful antibodies. He most likely already had contracted the virus before his body started to produce antibodies.

The man is still alive, and had been living with HIV for two decades at the time his blood was drawn.

nydailynews.com