Developing a vaccine for HIV may be harder than researchers thought, according to linkurl:a study;http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature07746.html published online in Nature. Just as the virus develops resistance to antiviral drugs, it also evolves to evade the human immune system on a population-wide level, the researchers report.
Previous studies have examined the interaction of viral evolution with the human immune system in single patients, finding that people with certain variants of human leukocyte antigen (HLA), a key recognition element in the human immune system, can better control the infection. Those studies provided "a small window of what's going on," said Colm O'hUigin, who studies viral evolution at the National Cancer Institute in Frederick, Md., and was not involved in the research. "This take is different because it gave a longer-term [view]-- and that is that the HLA is beginning to shape the virus in the population." The...
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Image: NIAID |
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