Scientific American takes a look at the research into AIDS, a decade after President Clinton set a goal to find a vaccine within ten years:
Global spending for HIV vaccine research increased from $186 million in 1997 to $759 million in 2005, according to the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS. The IAVI helped to move the field forward by establishing research consortia so that investigators could more easily coordinate and exchange information. The group partnered with governments and vaccine makers to conduct trials outside the U.S., which account for nearly half of the 30-plus trials currently in progress. The NIH formed its own HIV vaccine trial network in 2000 to oversee clinical research sites in the U.S., Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and South America.
The scale of the effort reflects the scientific challenges. In the early 1980s, after identifying the HIV virus as the cause of AIDS, researchers were at first confident that they could come up with a vaccine against it within a few years, Koff says. Vaccines work by exposing the body to a disease-causing agent or a fragment of it. That exposure primes the immune system to produce a flood of antibodies that stick to the infecting organism and block it from entering cells. Researchers identified a protein on the surface of HIV, dubbed gp120, that enables the virus to infect and then slowly destroy so-called helper T cells, which regulate immune responses. The gp120 protein seemed like a good candidate for an HIV vaccine.
Read this entire fascinating article from Scientific American here.
[...] The IAVI helped to move the field forward by establishing research …Original post by elfninosmom delivered by Medtrials and [...]
i love having aids!! it makes me the center of attention!!
Lebron, are you by chance the same person who wrote the Ron Paul newsletters? I ask because that’s pretty much what was said, idiotic though it is.