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Published online 5 November 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.1208
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HIV vaccine failure explained?
Failed vaccine makes immune cells easier to infect in culture.
Researchers have suggested that an experimental vaccine against AIDS might have failed in part because it made some people's immune cells more vulnerable to HIV infection.
The team, led by Eric Kremer of the University of Montpellier in France, examined why people participating in the STEP vaccine trial who had previously been exposed to a cold virus, adenovirus 5, seemed more likely to become infected with HIV-1 than those who hadn't been exposed to the virus (see 'HIV vaccine may raise risk.
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Vaccines are not always the case.It's diffcult to define the medicine and the poision.
Has anyone read "Inventing the HIV virus" be Peter Duesberg? Please read this book, and talk to the man, before you go seek 'cure' for AIDS/HIV. God speed.
Having been at the recent AIDS Vaccine 2008 Conference in Cape Town, I can tell you that the STEP / Phambili trial results have cast a pall of gloom over the HIV vaccine field, to the extent that some informed folk (as opposed to the lunatic fringe, like one mentioned above) are questioning whether or not we should abandon our efforts. But we should not, and here is why: several things came to light at the conference that pointed up that the STEP/Phambili result was a failure of product, and not of concept - meaning that improving the product within the same concept could improve the result. And someone did just that: Dan Barouch of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center at Harvard U repeated an experimental version of that trial, with SIV equivalents of the genes in two different adenovirus vectors, and got significant protection in macaques to a stern, virulent virus challenge - which is something the monkey version of the Merck vaccine did not do. Better product, better result. So don't write off HIV vaccines just yet....