On/Off Switch Could Be Key to HIV Vaccine | AIChE

On/Off Switch Could Be Key to HIV Vaccine

May
2017

A new vaccine for HIV is controlled by a genetic kill switch that may make for a safer, less infectious inoculation than earlier options.

More than 36 million people worldwide were living with HIV as of 2015, and more than a million people died of the virus in that year alone, according to the World Health Organization. HIV, which stands for human immunodeficiency virus, attacks the immune system and leaves those infected susceptible to life-threatening infection and cancer.

The ways in which HIV interacts with the immune system are still being uncovered 36 years after the virus was first recognized in the U.S. HIV also mutates rapidly, says Wei Niu, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the Univ. of Nebraska, Lincoln. For those two reasons, progress on developing a vaccine has been frustratingly slow.

Live-attenuated vaccines, in which the virus is weakened but not killed, have worked best in monkeys. Those vaccines elicit the largest immune response and thus the best protection, Niu says, but they sometimes mutate and begin to replicate, causing...

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