New Hope in the Fight Against HIV

I once tweeted "God does not make junk," in an attempt to give myself a little self-confidence boost. Someone tweeted back that "Yes, he does... just look at junk DNA."

Apparently, "junk DNA" may help create a vaccine against HIV:

About 95% of the human genome has once been designated as "junk" DNA. While much of this sequence may be an evolutionary artifact that serves no present-day purpose, some junk DNA may function in ways that are not currently understood. The conservation of some junk DNA over many millions of years of evolution may imply an essential function that has been "turned off." Now scientists say there's a junk gene that fights HIV. And they've discovered how to turn it back on.

What these scientists have done could give us the first bulletproof HIV vaccine. They have re-awakened the human genome's latent potential to make us all into HIV-resistant creatures, and hey've published their ground-breaking research in PLoS Biology.

A group of scientists led by Nitya Venkataraman and Alexander Colewhether wanted to try a new approach to fighting HIV - one that worked with the body's own immune system. They knew Old World monkeys had a built-in immunity to HIV: a protein called retrocyclin, which can prevent HIV from entering cell walls and starting an infection. So they began poring over the human genome, looking to see if humans had a latent gene that could manufacture retrocyclin too. It turned out that we did, but a "nonsense mutation" in the gene had turned it off at some point in our evolutionary history.

A lot of science appears in the article, but the quick rundown is this: scientists have found the protein that protects monkeys from HIV was once produced by humans, but a mutation turned that gene off. A compound -- known as an aminoglycoside (such as streptamycin) -- can help turn it back on (though there may be some as-yet undetermined consequences). Aminoglycosides, in some studies, have shown to improve cystic fibrosis in some patients through a similar genetic process.

In short: apparently, even junk DNA is useful. But it is too early to tell, so we'll see.

HIV/AIDS Caught on Tape!

I think this is nerdy-cool. Scientists have taken a video of HIV transmitting itself from one T-cell to another at the rate of 0.2 microns a second -- if you do the math, that's equivalent of a 6-foot man running at 33 mph!!! The picture above shows the HIV -- lit up in green -- moving from one cell to the next.

From insciences organisation (from an article in Science with the same information, but reported widely in sources like Yahoo! news and US News & World Report):

"Our findings may explain why attempts to develop an HIV vaccine have so far been unsuccessful," said Thomas Huser, one of the study's authors and chief scientist at the UC Davis Center for Biophotonics Science and Technology (CBST), where the video images were produced using advanced, live-cell video imaging microscopy.

While previous efforts to create an HIV vaccine have focused on priming the immune system to recognize and attack surface proteins of free-circulating virus, the current results indicate that HIV avoids recognition by being directly transferred between cells.

"We should be developing vaccines that help the immune system recognize proteins involved in virological synapse formation and antiviral drugs that target the factors required for synapse formation," explained Huser, who is also an associate professor in the UC Davis Department of Internal Medicine.

For decades, scientists believed that HIV mainly spreads in the body through free-circulating particles that attach to a cell, take over its replication machinery and make multiple copies of themselves. Once in the bloodstream, the new particles attach to target cells and continue the process.

In 2004, scientists discovered that cell-to-cell transfer of HIV also occurred via virological synapses. This was considered to be an effective method of transferring the infection, but the reasons were unclear. The current study, however, reveals that the synapse is providing the essential structure by which viral proteins are gathered and relocated to uninfected cells.

"Direct T-cell-to-T-cell transfer through a virological synapse is a highly efficient avenue of HIV infection, and it could be the predominant mode of dissemination," said study senior author Benjamin Chen, assistant professor of medicine and infectious diseases at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

I want to see this video! It looks like WhyFiles.org may have it, but I don't want to download QuickTime.

Thanks to @Dr_Jared and his blog for the video!!!



So neat!!!!! (The green bud is HIV itself -- kinda creepy, ain't it?)

HIV Update!

For years and years, working in and out of AIDS agencies, there were two fights that we always thought were left to really be fought. On the one hand, we have the disproportionate amount of money being spent on money for AIDS when other long-term, chronic diseases get left to fend for themselves. The fact that AIDS has a higher mortality rate, more complications, higher cost of treatment over a longer time, etc. etc. never entered into the debate.

The other was the drastic disparity of AIDS money, which was distributed back in the classic days of AIDS when the disease was focused on the urban centers and classically gay meccas. Now it's moving and President Obama is being asked to retool the money to reflect that:

Following a battle on the Senate floor last night, San Francisco may once again receive a disproportionate amount of HIV/AIDS funding if the omnibus appropriations bill passes. U.S. Senator Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., introduced an amendment to stop that funding shift and ensure rural and southern states with increasing HIV/AIDS populations are properly funded. The Senate voted against the amendment by a vote of 42-53.

“This body just gutted a carefully worked formula where all individuals with HIV/AIDS truly got the funding and resources needed. Now we’re back to square one with rural and southern states taking a back seat to the districts of Democratic leadership,” said Enzi.

The omnibus package includes a provision to overturn funding formulas that the Senate and House carefully negotiated in the reauthorization of Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency (CARE) Act in 2006. Enzi worked on those funding formulas to ensure all states were treated fairly, especially rural areas and the South, where the disease is spreading most rapidly. Enzi’s 2007 amendment, identical to this year’s omnibus amendment, passed the Senate by a vote of 65-28. House Democratic Leadership inserted a provision in the omnibus appropriations bill, H.R. 1105, that would put funding for Ryan White at levels prior to the 2006 changes. Those formulas favor cities like San Francisco that have a longer history of AIDS infections over states where the disease is now spreading.

“This exact amendment passed the Senate two years ago and now it was voted down by strict party lines. If this is bipartisanship and change in action then we’re in trouble. It is unfortunate that HIV/AIDS patients are turning into pawns for leadership to score political points,” said Enzi.

Enzi said this change in the omnibus bill does not allow money to follow the patient; it allows money to follow those who are in power.

It's actually a really good point to be made, but we were always in a semi-lucky place here in Ohio in that we didn't stand to lose much, nor did we stand to gain much either. So, yea...

On another front of the HIV/AIDS issue, the newest step towards an HIV vaccine is starting to show promise:

With the support of the National Institutes of Health, the Arnolds and their team have been able to take a piece of HIV that is involved with helping the virus enter cells, put it on the surface of a common cold virus, and then immunize animals with it. They found that the animals made antibodies that can stop an unusually diverse set of HIV isolates or varieties.

Some researchers have previously been able to elicit effective antibodies, but usually only against a very limited number of HIV types. With HIV’s known propensity to mutate, antibodies developed against one local strain may not recognize and combat mutant varieties elsewhere. These geographic varieties with different mutations constitute one of the great challenges to finding a broad spectrum vaccine capable of protecting against the vast array of HIV varieties.

The approach taken by the Arnolds and their colleagues has been to identify a part of the AIDS virus that is crucial to its viability – something the virus needs in order to complete its life cycle – and then target this Achilles heel.

“The part that we targeted plays a role in the ability of HIV to enter cells, and is common to most HIV varieties,” Gail Ferstandig Arnold said. “That is a mechanism that would not be easy for the virus to reinvent on the fly, so it turns out to be a really helpful target.”

...but a lot of possibilities have shown promise, so this is, as yet, of undetermined significance. Not until we get a good, strong, human study will we know much more than this.

HIV/AIDS: "Resetting Priorities"

This graphic from the below article provides no useful information :-)
There is a great story that can be found here on the cover of Chemical and Engineering News about the hunt for an HIV/AIDS vaccine and the reason the most recent attempts have either failed or been pulled. It's a great rundown of what's been going down and why, excactly, our two most recent "hopeful" attempts -- the 2003 AIDSVax and the more recent (2007) Merck trials -- failed and changed the way we consider the process of searching for a vaccine.

It's really a science laden article, but I think it can be easily understood from a lay perspective. But the final lines are especially poignant:

"Developing and delivering an HIV vaccine," Bernstein says, "has to be a global effort, and that's where the enterprise uniquely comes in because we're charged with bringing together people from all over the world—whether they are funders, scientists, governments, advocates, or industry—to work together."

Vaccine development has always relied heavily on empiricism. And even when successful, it has more often than not taken several decades to create a vaccine after finding the cause of a disease. "This is going to be a long haul," Bernstein says. "There are no quick wins, and we should stop thinking and planning like there are."

Anyways, check it out. Here is a break down of all the previous attempts and how they fared in FDA trials (btw --> Phase III is the final phase before general usage; Phase IV "trials" is seeing what happens in the general population...):


PS This is especially interesting in the context of this blog as I talked about the Merck failure exactly a year ago here. Weird. I can now back-quote myself.

HIV/AIDS: Top 10 HIV/AIDS Stories from 2007

So, it's a day late (on my part), but 365Gay (owned by Viacom) posted a nice recap of the Top 10 HIV/AIDS news stories from 2007 in honor of World AIDS Day. The link can be found here .

The headlines:

1) HIV Numbers were too high -- new estimate it at 33.2 million infected in the world, with 6,800 new infections a day and 2.1m AIDS deaths a year

2) HIV infections rising among gay men -- 13% increase between 2001 and 2005 (One day I will recap my vent about the "AIDS numbers game," but the point is there... Men who have sex with men -- MSMs -- are the number one group getting HIV in this country)

3) Merck AIDS vaccine harmful -- oh yea, it increased the susceptibility to HIV/AIDS... oops

4) Conservative Protestants/Catholics taking on AIDS -- it's about time the conservative right recognized the human aspect of the disease

5) Bush asks for doubled funding for fighting world AIDS -- that would still only be $30billion, so just under a dollar per person infected... thanks, Shrub, your kindness knows no bounds

6) Democratic presidential candidates pressed to end AIDS -- supporting crazy ideas like $50billion in world funding, allowing needle exhange, comprehensive sex ed, and allowing HIV-positive foreigners to visit our country.. thanks, guys, these don't seem all that "activist" to me, I'm disappointed it took this long

7) Resurrection of virus may help us understand HIV -- using a form of HIV that was once found in ... rabbits?

8) World Health Org recommends circumcision -- after it was found that, yes, in fact, men who are circumcised are less likely to catch HIV, which is something most African prostitutes already knew

9) Washington, DC tops the list of infected cities -- to the tune of 1 in 50 people being infected (and, to add on, it is estimated, per other sites, that 1 in 7 black men in that city, I believe)

10) Homeland Security Restricts Travel for PWA -- because HIV has a lot to do with nuclear weapons

There you go. My responses came out cattier than I had expected.

HIV/AIDS: A disappointment...

Looks like the newest round of AIDS vaccines has failed. Sigh. This was one of the ones that we were really counting on as it held so much promise, but 24/741 of those receiving the vaccine became infected (3.2% -- please note, they don't become infected by the vaccine, they are not asked to change their lifestyle while on the vaccine) versus 21/762 (2.75%). Statistically insignificant difference.

Ironically, though, I wonder if the slight uptick in percentage has anything to do with people thinking they are safer after having taken it, but I'm not sure if, with such a small sample size, it really matters at all.

There was hope, btw, that even if it did not actually block HIV, that it would slow down the process of infection, making it easier for the body to fight off before seroconversion. This using.. get this... the common cold as the delivery agent???

From the article in the LATimes:

Michael Zwick, an HIV researcher at Scripps Research Institute, said the vaccine's failure was unfortunate. But he said it was too soon to know whether other vaccines using the same strategy would also fail.

"It's par for the course in the HIV field," he said of the Merck result.

The volunteers in the experiment were all free of HIV at the start. But they were at high risk for getting the virus: Most were homosexual men or female sex workers. They were all repeatedly counseled about how to reduce their risk of HIV infections, according to Merck.

In a statement, the NIH said a data safety monitoring board, reviewing interim results, found the vaccine did not prevent HIV infection. Nor did it limit the severity of the disease "in those who become infected with HIV as a result of their own behaviors that exposed them to the virus" -- another goal of the study.

Also, here's the article from 365gay.com (which clued me in this morning).

I think it's sad that this is considered "par for the course" in this line of work. It's almost... well, disappointing.