Body's own anti-HIV 'training manual' brings hope for vaccines

The body's own "training manual" for attacking HIV has been recorded by US scientists and it is hoped it can be used to design vaccines.

HIV mutates in order to survive the onslaught of a patient's immune system.

However, some patients develop highly effective antibodies that can neutralise huge swathes of HIV mutants.

A North Carolina team analysed the arms race between body and virus, published in the journal Nature, and has shown how these antibodies are made.

When someone is infected with HIV, their body produces antibodies to attack it. But the virus mutates and evades the offensive, so the body produces new antibodies that the virus then evades and the war goes on.

However, after about four years of this struggle some patients hit on to a winner by targeting something the virus finds harder to change - an Achilles heel.

"Even though the virus mutates and there are literally millions of quasi-species of virus because of all these mutations, but there are parts the virus can't change otherwise the virus cannot infect - these are the vulnerable sites," Prof Barton Haynes, of Duke University, in North Carolina, told the BBC.

At this stage of the infection it is far too late to make a difference for the patient as the virus is hiding in untouchable reservoirs.

However, some researchers believe that vaccines that encourage the body to produce these "broadly neutralising antibodies" may give people immunity to the virus.


/BBC/