Word: nussenzweig
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...antibody may have little effect, but as a group - or even in lab-created packages of 20 to 50 antibodies - they seem to confer some protection against disease progression. "It's the first time that anybody's really looked at what the antibody response is," says senior investigator Michel Nussenzweig, head of the Rockefeller University's Laboratory of Molecular Immunology. "If we know what can work in nature, then the next step would be, Let's see if we can reproduce it." (See the most common hospital mishaps...
...engineering approach, finding inspiration for new vaccines by studying HIV immunity in nature, would have been impossible back in 1984 - or, indeed, until just a few years ago. Too little was known about the virus's structure or about the human immune system in general. One recent necessary breakthrough, Nussenzweig says, was finding a way to identify the blood cells that create HIV-specific antibodies. It was only after those cells could be separated from the bloodstream that scientists like Nussenzweig and Johannes Scheid, the first author on the Nature paper, could begin to study them properly...
...other candidates in early phase trials, including compounds of two previously tested candidates, just in case they turn out to be effective together where each failed individually. Since Merck's setback in 2007, however, some scientists have questioned current vaccine-development tactics. And some researchers, including those in Nussenzweig's lab, are now trying to produce HIV immunity through antibodies; but despite good results in primates, they have had no luck so far in humans with a single-antibody vaccine...
...body very quickly, so the immune system doesn't always recognize the virus as something it's encountered before. This is a stumbling block for vaccinemakers, but it's also the reason so few people are able to control an HIV infection naturally, like the six people studied in Nussenzweig's lab. Now, understanding this process could be key to the next vaccines. "It's just that the antibodies are too late," Nussenzweig says, referring to the typical immune response. "The antibody is always chasing the virus around. You get an antibody. It has an effect. Then the virus mutates...
...antibodies are there to begin with" - introduced via vaccine, for example - "they can prevent the infection," says Nussenzweig. "I think they could provide high-grade immunity if they were present in high-enough quantities before infection - but they'd have to be there beforehand...