New technology opens gateway to studying HIV-specific neutralising antibodies
Saturday, March 21, 2009 - 09:23
in Health & Medicine
Many scientists believe a vaccine that prevents HIV infection will need to stimulate the body to make neutralising antibodies, infection-fighting proteins that prevent HIV from entering immune cells. Previous research has shown that some individuals who control HIV infection without medication naturally produce antibodies able to neutralise diverse strains of HIV. Until now, however, scientists were hampered in studying the way effective HIV-neutralising antibodies arise during natural HIV infection because scientists lacked the tools to obtain more than a few HIV-specific antibodies from any given individual...