HIV Vaccine Research a Field Apart From Classic Vaccinology

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/721410

Bob Roehr

The research on HIV vaccinations has decided to break away from claissic vaccinology and the adaptive immune reponse and carve a path of its own. The major shift is that instead of looking for ways to protect against infection and instead focus on finding ways to change the nature of the infection. The reason? The classical approaches that have been successful in the past simply do not apply to HIV. Researchers have found that many attempts to use the same techniques have been unsuccessful.

The changing face of research boils down to looking at an immune response that protects against acquisition, which is very different from the immune response that actually controls chronic virus replication.

The molecular pathway that makes this the case is hypoglycosylate. Hypoglycosylate appears to be easier to neutralize than variants found later in infection. Once the virus has takenn a hold in the body, the virus rapidly diverges and diversifies with conformational changes and the addition of glycands that can shield antibody binding sites, and the virus prevails. Once the virus robustly replicates and gets into the lymphoid tissue a chance for a vaccine to be effective is over. Now, there is no chance to eradicate the virus s the focus really needs to be on blocking acquisition.