U.S. researchers discover effective AIDS antibodies

Researchers have discovered three new powerful, naturally occurring antibodies which destroy up to 91 percent of known HIV strains, a new study reports.

The Wall Street Journal has the scoop on the breakthrough:

The new discovery is the latest in what Wayne Koff, head of research and development at the nonprofit International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, calls a “renaissance” in HIV vaccine research.

Antibodies that are utterly ineffective, or that disable just one or two strains, are common. Until last year, only a handful of “broadly neutralizing antibodies,” those that efficiently disable a large swath of HIV strains, had been discovered, and none of them neutralized more than about 40% of known HIV variants.

But in the last year, thanks to efficient new detection methods, at least a half dozen broadly neutralizing antibodies, including the three latest ones, have been identified in peer-reviewed journals. Most of the new antibodies are also more potent, able to knock out HIV at far lower concentrations than their previously known counterparts.

The strongest of the three antibodies was investigated for a study published in the journal Science as a lead up to the International AIDS Conference which will convene in Vienna Austria later this month.

The antibody the researchers detailed attacks a very specific spot on HIV, a stalk like growth which the virus uses to bond with the body’s white blood cell, CD4. Without it, the virus is unable to infect those cells and reproduce.

That fusion site has been a target of drugs as well. With the FDA approving a drug last year which blocks the receptor site the virus bonds to. That site is called a CCR-5. A small percentage of the population has a genetic mutation which has eliminated that site from the surface of CD4 white blood cells.