Newly Discovered Antibody Neutralizes 91% of HIV Strains

AIDS researchers discovered an antibody in one patient that is able to defeat 91% of all known strains of HIV:

The HIV antibodies were discovered in the cells of a 60-year-old African-American gay man, known in the scientific literature as Donor 45, whose body made the antibodies naturally. The trick for scientists now is to develop a vaccine or other methods to make anyone's body produce them as well.[...]

HIV is a highly mutable virus, but one place where the virus doesn't mutate much is where it attaches to a particular molecule on the surface of cells it infects. Building on previous research, researchers created a probe, shaped exactly like that critical site, and used it to attract only those antibodies that efficiently attack it. That is how they fished out of Donor 45 the special antibodies: They screened 25 million of his cells to find 12 that produced the antibodies.

Donor 45's antibodies didn't protect him from contracting HIV. That is likely because the virus had already taken hold before his body produced the antibodies. He is still alive, and when his blood was drawn, he had been living with HIV for 20 years.

The researchers hope to use this discovery to develop a vaccine for HIV.

Link via Popular Science | Image: CDC | Previously: Progress on HIV Vaccine

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This will be the last time we hear of this.

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SuperCrap, you may wish to read through http://www.prb.org/pdf06/HowHIVAIDSAffectsPopulations.pdf and compare the numbers there with what you find under "HIV Risk Factor: sexual orientation" within http://www.apositivelife.com/forasos/demographic-risk-factors-for-hiv.html

When you're done, you might want to give a little more thought to how "the population of the United States" is not the same thing as "the human population." Fact.

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It's not a stereotype you dummy, HIV and AIDS rates are much higher among gay males than the rest of the human population -- fact. It is sort of like if a study was on type 2 diabetes and they said that the person resistant to the disease was a morbidly obese African American male, well the fact he is morbidly obese and African American and male does have some epidemiological signifigance, sorry if that offends your righteous sense of political correctness.

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@Gauldar The problem with mentioning the man's sexual orientation here is that many people still think HIV/AIDS is a gay disease. It escalated the stigma against the LGBT community in the 80s and has never really dissipated. We don't need to know his sexual orientation, except to further negative stereotypes of an oppressed community.