A new vaccine for simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), a model for HIV, controlled SIV in half of tested rhesus monkeys, linkurl:research;http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature10003.html published today (May 11) in Nature reports. The vaccine, which employs a viral vector that remains latent throughout the body for a lifetime, appears to keep T-cells active and ready to fight the invading virus."This is an absolutely momentous development," said pathologist linkurl:Peter Barry;http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/pathology/our_team/faculty/barryp.html of University of California Davis who was not involved in the research. "There is still room for optimization, but it's really quite remarkable that they're getting essentially 50 percent control."
Scientists have struggled to develop an effective vaccine against SIV and HIV, in part due to how quickly the viruses spread through the body and evolve to evade immune defenses. Previous vaccines, such as the one tested in the failed linkurl:STEP...
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Image: Wikimedia commons, CDC |
S.G. Hansen et al., "Profound early control of highly pathogenic SIV by an effector memory T-cell vaccine," Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature10003, 2011.
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