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imported_I, fuzzbot. imported_I, fuzzbot. is offline
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Old Dec 5th, 2004, 02:51 PM        A cure for AIDS., Vaccine stops HIV in its tracks.
Nov. 29, 2004 -- It worked in mice. It worked in monkeys. And now in humans, a therapeutic vaccine has stopped HIV in its tracks.

The vaccine is made from a patient's own dendritic cells and HIV isolated from the patient's own blood. Dendritic cells are crucial to the immune response. They grab foreign bodies in the blood and present them to other immune cells to trigger powerful immune system responses to destroy the foreign invaders.

HIV infection normally turns these important immune system responses off. But animal studies show that when dendritic cells are "loaded" with whole, killed AIDS viruses, they can trigger effective immune responses that keep infected animals from dying of AIDS.

Wei Lu, Jean-Marie Andrieu, and colleagues at the University of Paris in France and Pernambuco Federal University in Recife, Brazil, tested the vaccine on 18 Brazilian patients. All had HIV infection for at least a year. Their T-cell counts -- a crucial measure of AIDS progression -- were dropping, meaning their disease was worsening. None was taking anti-HIV medications.

After getting three under-the-skin injections of the tailor-made vaccine, the amount of HIV in the patients' blood (called the viral load) dropped by 80%. After a year, eight of the 18 patients still had a 90% drop in HIV levels. All patients' T-cell counts stopped dropping.

The findings appear in the December issue of Nature Medicine.

"The results suggest that [these] vaccines could be a promising strategy for treating people with chronic HIV infection," Andrieu and colleagues write. "The significant decrease of viral load as well as maintenance of ... [T-]cell counts observed at one year after immunization are particularly promising."

The researchers warn that their study is only proof of principle. It's still not clear which patients do best with the vaccine, although there's evidence that vaccination should be given as soon after HIV infection as possible. Only clinical trials comparing people who get the vaccine to those who don't can show whether this vaccine really is an effective AIDS therapy.

Similar approaches are being explored for the treatment of cancer and long-term viral infections such as hepatitis C.

Source: WebMDHealth.
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Old Dec 5th, 2004, 02:57 PM       
If this is for real, then holy shit. If it works, this is great news.
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Old Dec 5th, 2004, 04:39 PM       
It's for real, but it doesn't seem to be practical. You need to be injected every two weeks, and it is very expensive. Still, it is nice to hear some good news for a change.

Source: http://www.onlypunjab.com/real/fulls...wsID-4236.html

HIV Vaccine Suppressed Virus By At Least 80% in Small Group of Patients
Publish Date : 12/4/2004 5:33:00 PM Source : Onlypunjab.com Team


An experimental therapeutic HIV vaccine suppressed the virus in a small group of HIV-positive Brazilians for up to a year, according to a study published Sunday in the online edition of the British journal Nature Medicine, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.

Drs. Jean-Marie Andrieu and Wei Lu of the Institute of Research for Vaccines and Immunotherapies for Cancer and AIDS in Paris led the research. Researchers administered the vaccine -- which is designed to treat the virus rather than prevent infection -- to 18 HIV-positive Brazilians who had never taken any antiretroviral drugs (Russell, San Francisco Chronicle, 11/29).

Every two weeks, the patients received injections that contained a mixture of their own dendritic cells -- a type of cell that is in the first line of defense in the immune system -- and whole HIV that had been chemically inactivated. Dendritic cells mark invaders with an antigen, or "tag," that helps to activate lymphocytes, another type of immune system cell, according to AFP/Independent Online.

However, HIV is able to avoid being marked with antigens, and therefore evades detection by the immune system. The goal of the vaccine is to stimulate dendritic cells to recognize and mark the virus in order to mount a larger immune response (AFP/Independent Online, 11/29).

Results

Four months after their first immunization, the patients' viral load levels were reduced by a median of 80%, Reuters reports.

At the end of one year, eight of the patients had viral load levels that were 90% lower than their baseline levels (Reuters, 11/29).

In addition, four patients' viral load levels were less than 1,000 copies per milliliter, a level so low that "in theory" means they "are not infective," Andrieu said, AFP/Independent Online reports.

In addition, the patients' CD4+ T cell counts initially increased but fell back to their baseline levels. None of the patients experienced side effects (AFP/Independent Online, 11/29).

Costs, Next Steps

Currently, the vaccine is "impractical" to deliver to large numbers of people because it is "essentially custom made" for each patient, the Chronicle reports. Andrieu estimated that the cost of the treatment for one year could be $4,000 to $8,000 per person (San Francisco Chronicle, 11/29).

Although the trial results suggest that this type of therapeutic vaccine shows potential to treat HIV-positive people, the researchers cautioned that additional research is necessary, Reuters reports. "We should emphasize ... that the efficacy of such a therapeutic vaccine will not be definitively proven until a randomized trial with an appropriate control arm has been performed," the researchers wrote (Reuters, 11/29).
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Old Dec 6th, 2004, 12:11 AM       
Yeah the only way for people to safely say that AIDS is done with would be to develop a cure with immunizes before infection. Still yeah, good news.
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Old Dec 6th, 2004, 04:34 AM       
$4000 to $8000 isn't insanely expensive per year, and would most likely be covered under health insurance, and would lower costs overall, since infections would be down.

This brightened my night.
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Old Dec 6th, 2004, 04:52 PM       
I didn't notice if it said this, but does it mention how long they have to take the treatments for?
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Old Dec 8th, 2004, 02:47 AM       
It's just odd that every so often articles get published about some new potential AIDS cures...and then nothing. It never gets mentioned again. Drug companies would rather develop a cocktail you have to suck down the rest of your life then just cure the fucking thing. There's a huge industry wrapped around not curing it. God help the person or company who does find a cure....they'll be lucky if they live to see it ever make it's way to the public.
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Old Dec 8th, 2004, 02:59 AM       
Thank you, Chris Rock
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Old Dec 8th, 2004, 08:42 PM       
http://www.duesberg.com/

Chew on that.
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Old Dec 11th, 2004, 11:26 AM       
I think the french were the ones that first isolated the virus but they didnt test it first. The french and Peter Duesberg had some kind of deal that they would share the credit but at some speech he didnt mention them or somthing. They were tied in this legal argument for a while as I remember.
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Old Dec 11th, 2004, 12:48 PM       
As long as we get to call them 'freedom shots.'
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