For a very long time, scientists from all over the world have been trying to find a way to defeat the insidious HIV, which has already claimed many lives. A group of experts from the Scripps Research Center (USA) has been developing a vaccine against a dangerous virus for the last 20 years, and recently an experimental drug has passed the first tests and has shown high efficiency when used on primates, protecting animals from infection.
As reported in the journal Immunity, the authors used the following approach: the immune system must be "trained" to work with the virus and produce antibodies that would "hit" the vulnerable points of HIV. Sounds simple in practice, but in reality it is a real problem. To achieve the result, scientists influenced the immune system with a virus envelope protein that has a trimmer structure. But for a long time, experts have not been able to ensure that the protein is stable and only achieved success a few years ago.
Further, on the basis of a stable protein structure, a vaccine was created, which was tested on non-human primates of the macaque genus. The scientists took 3 groups of animals: 6 with a low titer of neutralizing antibodies, 6 with a high titer, and 12 more did not receive the vaccine and acted as a control group. After that, the animals were injected with a special version of HIV capable of infecting animals, which contains the same protein structure on the basis of which the vaccine was developed. The same protein is also found in the human variant of HIV. It turned out that the vaccine worked in animals that initially had a high titer of neutralizing antibodies. Other primates have contracted the virus.
Scientists realized that it was the neutralizing antibodies stimulated by the immune system that were able to protect animals from the virus. This is fundamentally different from the mass of other studies that are aimed at improving the functioning of the T cells of the immune system.
Vladimir Kuznetsov
