In this weeks blog we will be critiquing a virology paper on the development of an HIV vaccine using a cat virus as a model. The name of the paper is called Feline Immunodeficiency Virus Model for Designing HIV/AIDS Vaccines. You can click on this link if you would like to access the paper.
Let me just start by saying this was a very interesting article and it definitely got me thinking about vaccine design. The paper focused on a feline virus called FIV(feline acquired immunodeficiency) that is a distant cousin of HIV and let me just make the distinction before we continue, the scientist claim that this FIV in cats is the equivalent of HIV in humans. The authors of this paper are researchers at UF and UCSF.
The researchers proposed that we use the FIV as a model to develop an HIV vaccine. The reason why this would be beneficial is because apparently the FIV is able to make a protein that has anti-HIV properties. They saw that when they incubated HIV infected T cells with FIV, "one particular peptide region on FIV triggered patients' T cells to kill HIV"(Yamamoto). The scientists in this paper think that they can develop a vaccine that targets human T cells, which is something that has never been done before. The researchers think they can design a T cell HIV vaccine that is able to activate a human's immune response against the FIV or AIDS.
Reading this paper I was very excited because it proposed a new way to target the immune system. There were many reasons why this would be very hard to do. But the paper does propose many new ways in which we would be able to use FIV as a model for an HIV vaccine.
Paper: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3721975/#!po=55.6818
That is amazing. It is always so refreshing to see how scientists and researchers are thinking up of new ways to improve the quality of life. Really great article Karen!
ReplyDeleteThat is a huge development in research! To think, we can one day develop a vaccine against HIV! Of course there must be many tests being done to improve this vaccine but eventually it could really effect and benefit millions of people worldwide! This is history in the making!
ReplyDeleteThis is fantastic because a simple discovery like FIV could be the world's answer to HIV. I hope that these discoveries can be replicable in the human body because a number of research discoveries have great in vitro effects, but no or disastrous effects in vivo. Keep up with the research and maybe next week you can go more into the detailed biochemistry / immunology of how FIV can be used.
ReplyDeleteThe paper says “FIV has about 51% nucleic-acid identity and 29% amino-acid identity to HIV-1 at the viral structural and enzymatic proteins.” I thought this was interesting because the homology doesn’t seem to be that significant, but I guess one shouldn’t always look at the numbers. Exploiting the conserved epitopes of both viruses to design a universal vaccine is an ingenious idea. I wonder if they’ve done similar experiments with animals that are more closely related to Homo sapiens. This was an interesting article, Karen. Thanks for sharing.
ReplyDeleteThis is awesome! I think I read somewhere that they are also doing something with alligator blood. Scientists are now becoming more and more innovative with everything. Hopefully soon they will be able to find something for HIV. This is a great write up!
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