Go Back   Horror.com Forums - Talk about horror. > Horror, But Not Movies > True Crime
Register FAQ Community Calendar

Reply
 
Thread Tools
  #1  
Old 12-01-2004, 03:16 AM
bloodrayne's Avatar
bloodrayne bloodrayne is offline
Umbra Asylum

 
Join Date: Nov 2003
Location: I'm like smoke...I get in
Posts: 18,931
Send a message via Yahoo to bloodrayne
New AIDS Vaccine That Might Actually Work

Human Test: Novel Vaccine Stops HIV

Treatment Turns On Anti-HIV Immunity, Holds AIDS Virus in Check

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 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.

Wei Lu, Jean-Marie Andrieu, and colleagues at the University of Paris in France and Pernambuco Federal University in Recife, Brazil, tested the vaccine on 18 Brazilian patients. All had HIV infection for at least a year. Their T-cell counts -- a crucial measure of AIDS progression -- were dropping, meaning their disease was worsening. None was taking anti-HIV medications.

After getting three under-the-skin injections of the tailor-made vaccine, the amount of HIV in the patients' blood (called the viral load) dropped by 80%. After a year, eight of the 18 patients still had a 90% drop in HIV levels. All patients' T-cell counts stopped dropping.

The findings appear in the December issue of Nature Medicine.

"The results suggest that [these] vaccines could be a promising strategy for treating people with chronic HIV infection," Andrieu and colleagues write. "The significant decrease of viral load as well as maintenance of ... [T-]cell counts observed at one year after immunization are particularly promising."

The researchers warn that their study is only proof of principle. It's still not clear which patients do best with the vaccine, although there's evidence that vaccination should be given as soon after HIV infection as possible. Only clinical trials comparing people who get the vaccine to those who don't can show whether this vaccine really is an effective AIDS therapy.

Similar approaches are being explored for the treatment of cancer and long-term viral infections such as hepatitis C.
__________________
...
If you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance...Baffle 'em with bullshit

My Karma ran over my Dogma

God WAS my co-pilot...But, we crashed in the mountains and...I had to eat him

I'm suffocating in what's become of me...
The rancid remains of what I used to be
Reply With Quote
  #2  
Old 12-01-2004, 02:02 PM
The STE's Avatar
The STE The STE is offline
The Emperor of America
 
Join Date: Nov 2004
Location: Dr. Zaius
Posts: 7,670
Send a message via AIM to The STE
*throws away all my condoms*
__________________

===

WATCH MY MOVIES(UPDATED: 5/7/08, "No Exit")
RING OF HONOR: BEST WRESTLING IN THE WORLD


TOO GOOD FOR THE HDC BATTLE ROYALE
Reply With Quote
Reply


Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump


All times are GMT -8. The time now is 09:07 AM.