Da
http://www.medindia.net/news/Powerful-H ... 2031-1.htm
_____________
Powerful HIV-Neutralizing Antibody’s Pictures Revealed By Scripps Researchers
by Tanya Thomas on October 16, 2011
Researchers at The Scripps Research Institute have uncovered the surprising details of how a powerful anti-HIV antibody grabs hold of the virus. The findings, published in Science Express on October 13, 2011, highlight a major vulnerability of HIV and suggest a new target for vaccine development.
"What's unexpected and unique about this antibody is that it not only attaches to the sugar coating of the virus but also reaches through to grab part of the virus's envelope protein," said the report's co-senior author Dennis Burton, a professor at The Scripps Research Institute and scientific director of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative's (IAVI) Neutralizing Antibody Center, based on the Scripps Research La Jolla campus.
"We can now start to think about constructing mimics of these viral structures to use in candidate vaccines," said co-senior author Ian Wilson, who is Hansen Professor of Structural Biology and member of the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology at Scripps Research.
Other institutions in the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, and the Netherlands contributed to the research as part of an ongoing global HIV vaccine development effort.
Getting a Better Grip on HIV
Researchers from the current team recently isolated the new antibody and 16 others from the blood of HIV-infected volunteers, in work they reported online in the journal Nature on August 17, 2011. Since the 1990s, Burton, Wilson, and other researchers have been searching for such "broadly neutralizing" antibodies against HIV—antibodies that work against many of the various strains of the fast-mutating virus—and by now have found more than a dozen. PGT 128, the antibody described in the new report, can neutralize about 70 percent of globally circulating HIV strains by blocking their ability to infect cells. It also can do so much more potently—in other words, in smaller concentrations of antibody molecules—than any previously reported broadly neutralizing anti-HIV antibody.