HIV-infected T cellFLICKR, NIAIDWith a successful HIV vaccine still proving elusive, researchers have proposed antibody injections as possible short-term protection against the virus. Previous work has demonstrated that treating mice or macaques with anti-HIV antibodies can protect the animals against subsequent high-dose challenges with HIV or related viruses. Scientists from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and their colleagues have now shown that such protection may last for six months or more. After receiving a single injection of one of four broadly neutralizing HIV antibodies, macaques were able to withstand weekly low-dose challenges of a simian/human (SIV/HIV) chimeric virus for three to six months, according to a study published this week (April 27) in Nature.
“The result is surprising,” Ruth Ruprecht, who directs the AIDS Research Program at Texas Biomedical Research Institute and was not involved in the study, told The Verge. “I am astonished by how long protection lasted.”
“A caveat is that monkeys are not humans, but the model the authors use is about as good as it gets, and the results are a boost to HIV vaccine research and the use of passive antibodies as long-acting preventives,” Scripps Research Institute immunologist Dennis Burton, who was not involved with the work, told Nature. Moreover, added study coauthor Malcolm Martin of NIAID, “this might turn out to be a seasonal alternative to a vaccine until we really know how to make one.”
Such antibody treatments could also one day ...
