"Elite" HIV wife may hold secret to AIDS vaccine
Wed Aug 13, 2008 10:32am EDT
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A woman who has never shown symptoms of infection with the AIDS virus may hold the secret to defeating the virus, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.

Infected at least 10 years ago by her husband, the woman is able somehow to naturally control the deadly and incurable virus -- even though her husband must take cocktails of strong HIV drugs to control his.

She is a so-called "elite suppressor," and studies of her immune cells have begun to offer clues to how her body does it, the team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore said.

"This is the best evidence to date that elite suppressors can have fully pathogenic virus," said Dr. Joel Blankson, who led the study.

"The feeling was initially that they had defective virus," Blankson added in a telephone interview.

But the couple has been monogamous for at least 17 years, Blankson said, and tests show they are infected with the same strain of virus. What is different is the immune system of the wife, who cannot be named for privacy reasons.

"That's a good sign in terms of developing a therapeutic vaccine," Blankson said. Such a vaccine would not prevent infection but might be used to treat patients.

The AIDS virus infects at least 33 million people globally and more than a million in the United States. It has killed 25 million people since it was identified in the early 1980s.


http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/...227256020080813

Ever since I found out what Lupus was and how it hurts its victims, I've thought that if you could find a way to give HIV patients Lupus, the two might cancel each other out.

No, not really, because the two conditions are not comparable in that sense.

The primary reason HIV has proven so difficult to develop a vaccine for is that it mutates much more quickly in replication than other common viruses. It is much more likely that suppression therapy may allow HIV carriers from ever developing AIDS, and that even AIDS may eventually become a controllable condition with medication, much like diabetes or other health ailments that are no longer as serious as they once were.