Aids Vaccine
It worked in mice. It worked in monkeys. And now in humans, a therapeutic vaccine has stopped HIV in its tracks.The vaccine is made from a patient’s own dendritic cells (search) and HIV isolated from the patient’s own blood. Dendritic cells are crucial to the immune response. They grab foreign bodies in the blood and present them to other immune cells to trigger powerful immune system responses to destroy the foreign invaders.
HIV infection normally turns these important immune system responses off. But animal studies show that when dendritic cells are “loaded” with whole, killed AIDS viruses, they can trigger effective immune responses that keep infected animals from dying of AIDS.
Very exciting news. The downside of course is that for a while, perhaps a long while, this sort of custom made vaccine is going to be hideously expensive. That means rich people will be able to get it and poor people won’t.
It especially means that for the immediate future, this will be no help to the millions dying in Africa.
