Researchers may be one step closer to creating an AIDS vaccine as new study findings suggest an immune response against a cat AIDS virus protein is the key to developing a vaccine for humans.
"One major reason why there has been no successful HIV vaccine to date is that we do not know which parts of HIV to combine to produce the most effective vaccine," said Janet Yamamoto, a professor of retroviral immunology at the UF College of Veterinary Medicine and the study's corresponding author, in a news release.
The research was published in the October issue of the Journal of Virology.
The scientist are working on "a T-cell-based HIV vaccine that activates an immune response in T cells from HIV-positive individuals against the feline AIDS virus," according to the news release. "T-cell peptides are small pieces of protein that can prompt the body's T cells to recognize viral peptides on infected cells and attack them."
However, not all HIV peptides can be successfully used in vaccine components.
"In humans, some peptides stimulate immune responses, which either enhance HIV infection or have no effect at all, while others may have anti-HIV activities that are lost when the virus changes or mutates to avoid such immunity," she said. "So, we are looking for those viral peptides in the cat AIDS virus that can induce anti-HIV T-cell activities and do not mutate."
The scientists were able to identify a "feline viral region" similar to what is found in humans and across other species.
"That means it must be a region so essential that it cannot mutate for the survival of the virus," she said.
However, the similar regions does not mean cats can affect humans with HIV.
"We want to stress that our findings do not mean that the feline AIDS virus infects humans, but rather that the cat virus resembles the human virus sufficiently so that this cross-reaction can be observed," said study collaborator Dr. Jay A. Levy, a professor of medicine at UCSF.
"To date, a T-cell-based vaccine has not been used to prevent any viral diseases," Yamamoto said.
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