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Date Posted: 20:36:39 07/24/02 Wed
Author: No name
Subject: New AIDS Vaccine Consortium Zeroes in on Neutralizing Antibodies

New AIDS Vaccine Consortium Zeroes in on Neutralizing Antibodies




By Deborah Mitchell
BARCELONA, Spain (Reuters Health) Jul 09 - The International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), together with the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the US National Institutes of Health, has launched a 5-year initiative to investigate HIV neutralizing antibodies, which they hope will accelerate the development of an AIDS vaccine.

Although progress has been made in the development of vaccine candidates that elicit cell-mediated immunity, the induction of a broadly neutralizing antibody response has presented a larger obstacle, IAVI officials said Tuesday at the XIV International AIDS Conference.

"We need new [AIDS vaccine] candidates with broadly neutralizing antibodies. And IAVI is bringing together the world's experts on neutralizing antibodies to work in consortium to solve this thing," IAVI spokesman Victor Zonana told Reuters Health.

"It's a multi-year, multi-million dollar commitment. Basically, IAVI is contributing the financial resources and the project management skills," he explained. To this end, "we have at our disposal $126.5 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation."

This is the first major scientific collaboration to concentrate on the discovery of HIV neutralizing antibodies. "What we suspect is that cell-mediated immunity alone cannot work fast or effectively enough to provide the high degree of protection across a large population that we tend to associate with the concept of vaccines," said Dr. Dennis Burton, Consortium Director. "We are likely to need to elicit neutralizing antibodies as well."

Along with Dr. Burton and Dr. Ian Wilson, both from The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, other founding members include Drs. Robert Doms of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia; John Moore of the Weill Medical College of Cornell University in New York; and Joseph Sodroski of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

Members from the NIAID include Drs. Gary Nabel, Richard Wyatt, and Peter Kwong.

"Sterile protection would be the best result of all, but even if neutralizing antibodies only blunt infection, this could be a major contribution to an effective vaccine," Dr. Doms commented.

"This is a mini-Manhattan project," Zonana added. The AIDS vaccine is "a solvable problem--neutralizing antibodies do exist in some rare individuals--5 have been isolated--and we're going after it."




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Reuters Health Information 2002. © 2002 Reuters Ltd.
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