BIO2AEW%HOFSTRA.BITNET@oac.ucla.edu (Al Wilson) (02/06/90)
Drew Hamilton writes: > > > Also, Can the immune system be taught to battle AIDS (just like chiken pox) > cause we could just develop an immunity shot to give a small dosage of AIDS to > the person. > No one has answered the question about vaccines for the AIDS virus yet, so I will attempt to. Yes, it is possible to develop a vaccine against the AIDS virus. There are two processes to do this. One is to take diassembled parts of the virus and inject them into a human. There is a problem with this approach. Many regions of AIDS are hypervariable, and it is impossible to collect each and every size and shape in order to prepare the immune system to be ready for the particular form that infects the person. Researchers are try to narrow down the most conserved parts. The is a technique of one of the polio vaccines, but there is no guarentee that it will work every time in every individual. Another way is to try and disable a whole virus and inject it into a person. It is believed that such an action provokes the immune system to work the best. The problem with this is that sometimes the virus becomes strong again, and ends up causing the disease it was meant to protect against. This is a technique of a different polio virus, where immunity has a better percentage of occuring, but in small amounts, people acutally come down with polio. The largest problem with a AIDS vaccine is "how to test" it. Conventionally it is done with animals, then humans. But there are no animals that are sickened by AIDS (while a few can be infected), so testing animals is out. And in reality, how can you test the effects on humans? If you give the vaccine to someone, the only way to test it is to inject the person with the virus and see if it replicates. I don't think there are many people willing to take the chance. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
dgreen (Dan R. Greening) (02/06/90)
Al Wilson <BIO2AEW%HOFSTRA.BITNET@oac.ucla.edu> writes: | The largest problem with a AIDS vaccine is "how | to test" it. Conventionally it is done with animals, | then humans. But there are no animals that are | sickened by AIDS (while a few can be infected), so | testing animals is out. And in reality, how can you | test the effects on humans? If you give the vaccine to | someone, the only way to test it is to inject the | person with the virus and see if it replicates. I don't | think there are many people willing to take the chance. There are some synthetic mice which have been engineered to contract AIDS, I believe. In the "Duesberg" sense, no we can't test an AIDS vaccine without injecting a person with HIV. However, one can take blood from vaccinated individuals, inject it with HIV, and see what happens. In fact, that is how current HIV vaccines are being tested. A number of readers from this newsgroup are participants in such a study, with a genetically engineered HIV protein gp160. Results from that study appear quite promising. For example, at one point during the study some fellow participants and I developed cytotoxic killer T cells to HIV infected cells. How was this tested? Lab workers took CD4-expressing cells from us, engineered those cells to express gp160, and grew them. Then they took our blood components, post-vaccination, and threw the engineered cells in there. For some of us, the CD4+gp160 expressing cells were killed. When laboratory results indicate that a vaccine might work well, a large population will be vaccinated and tracked. Aggregate conformance to safe-sex, safe-shoot behavior will make it harder to figure out whether the vaccination worked. However, based on the poor track record, safe-sex wise, of a number of gay acquantances, I am pretty sure that if a trial vaccine doesn't work, a few years of monitoring will discover a number of infections. I'd also guess there are plenty of IV drug-users with the same lack of control. (Grim thought, huh?) Nobody's planning on injecting HIV into any volunteers, that I know of, to test a vaccine. People neglect their own health for immediate gratification--it's almost a human axiom. As a statistical result, there is no need to inject HIV into anyone. People will inadvertantly do it themselves, despite being warned. One final cynical thought: People seem to hold out vaccines as some panacea to the AIDS crisis. Unfortunately, vaccine development is still a long way off, despite the flashy news headlines that appear all the time. In part, it's because people sit on their butts and wait, counting on others to advance a vaccine or a better treatment, and assume they can't contribute anything themselves. One major problem that NIH has, and that other vaccine developers have, is that few people volunteer for vaccine trials. It really bothers me that the NIH gp160 vaccine trial has taken over a year and a half to run. The major bottleneck has been a lack of volunteers, despite the fact that NIH is willing to fly volunteers to and from Washington, DC from as far as Hawaii. There are only 110 people in the study. 10 additional volunteers per month would have pushed the trial forward by several months. They still need people, both for the vaccine program (uninfected individuals) and for HIV treatment programs (infected individuals). The phone number is 1-800-ATRIALS. -- Dan Greening | NY 914-789-7861 | 12 Foster Court dgreen@cs.ucla.edu | CA 213-825-2266 | Croton-on-Hudson, NY 10520