7 ms·

Antibody Kills 91% of HIV Strains

125 points by jakarta 16y ago

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
bradleyland 16y ago
What happens if we manage to kill 91% of the HIV strains? Won't the remaining 9% of the strains continue to spread and mutate? Then we're back to square one.
- someone_here 16y ago
  Less people will be infected...
- hazzen 16y ago
  Likewise, 91% of the strains is not necessarily the same as 91% of the people currently living with HIV. Can anyone provide details on what, exactly, this finding does? Do we need to kill 100% of the HIV strains to have a cure? Is there one strain that is the "dangerous" one, and it isn't covered in the 91% number? Will the virus simply mutate new strains?
  - BahUnfair 16y ago
    I'd assume it means 91% of strains of HIV. It means that the odds that someone has a vulnerable strain is greatly increased and thus you can heal more people. HIV has a few limits, firstly (I think) it only infects one type of cell (CD4 immune cells - white blood cells), secondly, it doesn't spread as easy as influenza, you need to exchange some bodily fluids with someone, preferably with an abundant supply of CD4 cells to infect. Since it generally requires sex to get HIV, if you knock out 91% of strains the other strains wont rush in to fill the vacuum. The resistant strains already present will almost certainly increases as a proportion of the HIV population, its just natural selection. Use of condoms can prevent people from getting the resistant strains. Interestingly, male circumcision is also an excellent way to reduce chances of HIV infection because there will be less CD4 cells in your penis.
- sliverstorm 16y ago
  There's rarely an antibody that kills every possible strain of a disease, illustrated by the fact that there is not an antibody that kills every disease. 91% of HIV strains means we are 91% of the way to complete eradication. Plus, one of the big problems thus far have been we had NO IDEA how to attack the HIV bodies. Perhaps developing an understanding of this antibody will allow us to gain new understanding, and perhaps in good 'ol engineering tradition we will be able to change this, that, recompile, and cover a few more %. I know it's not that easy, but if you've ever developed code or hardware, having pre-existing, working models makes everything miles and miles easier.
  - albertcardona 16y ago
    91% of HIV strains means we are 91% of the way to complete eradication. That is inaccurate. Current antiviral agents remove most (as in over 90%) of the HIV viral particles from the blood of a patient. But then after weeks or months the viral load in blood is just as high. And any given patient has numerous strains within. Furthermore, most viral particles are not active: the virus saturates the immune system with defective particles (in a way it screens itself under noise). What's worse, HIV has long-term repositories like nervous system cells, from which particles are emitted at low rate. Killing your brain cells just to get rid of HIV defeats the purpose. What this novel antibody will do is to remove 91% of the strains, meaning the remaining 9% will flourish enormously . RNA viruses mutate very fast and broadly (always being one step before crash-error). What a good antibody can do is cut short the epidemics side of HIV: if a patient's HIV load is so low that it can't effectively and consistently pass on its infection to another person, the infection dies with the patient. This leads to a negative feedback loop that stops the epidemic. It's the same concept as vaccines: ensure that a sufficiently large proportion of the population is immune, so infections cannot spread when they inevitably appear in isolated individuals.
    - sliverstorm 16y ago
      So what you're saying is anyone who has HIV has been infected by every single HIV strain?
- seancron 16y ago
  It can, however, make the population of people who have HIV much smaller and slow the spread of it down dramatically.
- sliverstorm 16y ago
  At the very least, it could buy a second chance for a lot of people, even if it's not all of them. I'm sure there's plenty of people out there who are not career druggies or sluts who had one stupid or unlucky night that is going to ruin the rest of their lives, and could use a second chance. EDIT: sorry, I worded this terribly. What I meant was there are many people who would not catch HIV again, and thus would benefit from a cure to only 91% of HIV. The people who will continue being reckless and catch it again will, of course, not benefit from an antibody protecting them from only 91% of HIV, and that was what I was talking about when I referenced druggies. I'd be more than happy to give hardcore druggies a cure. The whole point was not that some people deserve it and some don't, but that some will gain huge benefits even if it's only 91%, and that is why even though it's not 100% coverage it's still a plus. (of course, not everyone will, because some people will go and catch the other 9% right away, so for them it's not really a benefit, but SOME WILL BENEFIT) EDIT2: to those of you still downvoting, are you trying to say you think every single person on the planet with AIDS would not catch it again if they were cured, but still vulnerable to some strains? That seems kind of unlikely.
  - BrandonM 16y ago
    You seem to be implying that "druggies" and "sluts" don't deserve a second chance edit: feel free to re-word it if you like, as long as you leave a note that you edited it.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - halo 16y ago
    >I'm sure there's plenty of people out there who are not career druggies or sluts That reminds me a lot of Good AIDS vs Bad AIDS from the British documentary satire Brass Eye (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFNs2mOkKzc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFNs2mOkKzc)
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- Natsu 16y ago
  Yeah, that's why the usual solution is to cobble together a bunch of different 90% solutions until you have something pretty close to a 100% solution. Scientists are going through something similar with fighting wheat rust (which you've probably never heard of, but it'll be an important problem if it gets out of control). The problem with HIV is that every obvious way of attacking it seems to have some kind of drawback that's less than obvious. You can sit around and think up all kinds of hypothetical scenarios for attacking it and find that people have already tried that. And failed.
  - lasonrisa 16y ago
    HN can be a very interesting place: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1496772 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1496772 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=158450 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=158450 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=661907 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=661907
    - Natsu 16y ago
      I guess should have known that the people around here would know what wheat rust is. But yeah, that stuff is pretty nasty, as far as its ability to kill wheat goes.
sliverstorm 16y ago
It's really a testament to nature and Darwin's theories that after all the time, effort and money we've been spending on AIDS research, the most successful antibody so far was not created by man, but by his DNA.
- bkudria 16y ago
  But it was created by a man! Seriously: Is the distinction that relevant?
  - hugh3 16y ago
    Well, on one hand, the antibody would have been created whether or not we'd been spending all this money on research. On the other hand, the antibody would never have been noticed if we hadn't been spending all this money on research.
    - sliverstorm 16y ago
      > On the other hand, the antibody would never have been noticed if we hadn't been spending all this money on research. Indeed. But, even though he is a homosexual man, the gene would likely be passed along eventually, and run its course through the human race (if we believe Darwin). We just don't want to wait that long. note: it would be passed one of a few ways: 1) his ancestors also had the gene, and he's not the only one to get it. He has heterosexual relatives who will pass it along, and they simply weren't found for one reason or another. 2) he wavers in his homosexuality, and passes his gene along to a few women OR he is bisexual 3) he donates sperm 4) it happens again in a heterosexual person. This gene arose in something like 30-40 years (I'm not really sure just how many) since the beginning of AIDS, which is an evolutionary blink. I think it's not unreasonable to figure it would arise again, and that it wouldn't take a bajillion years
      - earl 16y ago
        I don't think the gene arose in 40 years. Obviously it didn't, since the man is more than 40 years old. Instead, I think it's a gene that arose via happenstance and is suddenly much more useful.
alanh 16y ago
This is fantastic, but I can only imagine that 91% will become 9.1% within a decade, as the unaffected strains become dominant (just like superbugs).
- someone_here 16y ago
  But only 10% of the current number of people infected will be infected by that point.
  - hugh3 16y ago
    But how many AIDS patients have multiple strains?
    - FiReaNG3L 16y ago
      All of them
      - FiReaNG3L 16y ago
        I love how that got down voted and the general amount of HIV fud in this thread - I actually do HIV research, I would know. Most HIV people get infected by one strain, but it mutates so rapidly that in a single individual, multiple strains co exist at different levels (a major one and many, many lower levels ones).
- shasta 16y ago
  I doubt that infection with one strain of HIV is preventing infection with another strain, except to the extent that some of the people engaging in the most risky behavior are getting "taken out of the system" by AIDS. Something like this could lead to exponential decline among certain subnetworks of society.
- MikeCapone 16y ago
  Maybe, but how far forward will biotech have moved in 10 years? Buying time might be enough, in this case.
profitoftruth85 16y ago
I remember reading in "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell how STDs like HIV can be effectively stopped before they become epidemics. If this antibody can be administered and eliminate a large chunk of people with weaker strains of HIV, then assuming the stronger strains of HIV are in the same geographic area, a strong campaign of eliminating HIV spreading behavior in those areas could really reduce the spread of the disease. But like another poster said we don't know which strains are most prevalent, so it could be that a stronger strain is more widespread.
- uptown 16y ago
  "a strong campaign of eliminating HIV spreading behavior in those areas could really reduce the spread of the disease." That's a LOT easier said than done. There's a widely held belief in parts of the world (such as Africa) that having sex with a virgin cleanses one of AIDS. Because of this, child-rape is extremely prevalent in that part of the world. I suppose you could make the case that education is the easier part of solving the AIDS/HIV puzzle, but it's a very large behavioral problem that can not be solved using a scientific approach.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - profitoftruth85 16y ago
    you have a good point but we have no idea which areas are affected by the antibody. If Africa has a majority of strains that are cured, then I'm sure they could stem the spread of the disease in more developed areas. I don't think that belief is widespread outside of africa, or at least I wasn't aware of it.
rms 16y ago
:)
tokenadult 16y ago
"'We're going to be at this for a while' before any benefit is seen in the clinic, he said." No doubt. It is a first step. Good news if clinical application follows from this finding. As usual, I advise readers unfamiliar with Peter Norvig's article on reading scientific research reports http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html to check that for issues that may not be fully explored by this mass media report.
mmaunder 16y ago
This is great news.
dpritchett 16y ago
So if there's eventually an HIV vaccine that's 91% effective should everyone take it just in case? Even if you never expect to contract HIV this seems like a bit of a Pascal's Wager situation. Why risk it when there's a vaccine available?

125 points by jakarta 16y ago

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

What happens if we manage to kill 91% of the HIV strains? Won't the remaining 9% of the strains continue to spread and mutate? Then we're back to square one.

someone_here 16y ago
Less people will be infected...
hazzen 16y ago
Likewise, 91% of the strains is not necessarily the same as 91% of the people currently living with HIV. Can anyone provide details on what, exactly, this finding does? Do we need to kill 100% of the HIV strains to have a cure? Is there one strain that is the "dangerous" one, and it isn't covered in the 91% number? Will the virus simply mutate new strains?
- BahUnfair 16y ago
  I'd assume it means 91% of strains of HIV. It means that the odds that someone has a vulnerable strain is greatly increased and thus you can heal more people. HIV has a few limits, firstly (I think) it only infects one type of cell (CD4 immune cells - white blood cells), secondly, it doesn't spread as easy as influenza, you need to exchange some bodily fluids with someone, preferably with an abundant supply of CD4 cells to infect. Since it generally requires sex to get HIV, if you knock out 91% of strains the other strains wont rush in to fill the vacuum. The resistant strains already present will almost certainly increases as a proportion of the HIV population, its just natural selection. Use of condoms can prevent people from getting the resistant strains. Interestingly, male circumcision is also an excellent way to reduce chances of HIV infection because there will be less CD4 cells in your penis.
sliverstorm 16y ago
There's rarely an antibody that kills every possible strain of a disease, illustrated by the fact that there is not an antibody that kills every disease. 91% of HIV strains means we are 91% of the way to complete eradication. Plus, one of the big problems thus far have been we had NO IDEA how to attack the HIV bodies. Perhaps developing an understanding of this antibody will allow us to gain new understanding, and perhaps in good 'ol engineering tradition we will be able to change this, that, recompile, and cover a few more %. I know it's not that easy, but if you've ever developed code or hardware, having pre-existing, working models makes everything miles and miles easier.
- albertcardona 16y ago
  91% of HIV strains means we are 91% of the way to complete eradication. That is inaccurate. Current antiviral agents remove most (as in over 90%) of the HIV viral particles from the blood of a patient. But then after weeks or months the viral load in blood is just as high. And any given patient has numerous strains within. Furthermore, most viral particles are not active: the virus saturates the immune system with defective particles (in a way it screens itself under noise). What's worse, HIV has long-term repositories like nervous system cells, from which particles are emitted at low rate. Killing your brain cells just to get rid of HIV defeats the purpose. What this novel antibody will do is to remove 91% of the strains, meaning the remaining 9% will flourish enormously . RNA viruses mutate very fast and broadly (always being one step before crash-error). What a good antibody can do is cut short the epidemics side of HIV: if a patient's HIV load is so low that it can't effectively and consistently pass on its infection to another person, the infection dies with the patient. This leads to a negative feedback loop that stops the epidemic. It's the same concept as vaccines: ensure that a sufficiently large proportion of the population is immune, so infections cannot spread when they inevitably appear in isolated individuals.
  - sliverstorm 16y ago
    So what you're saying is anyone who has HIV has been infected by every single HIV strain?
seancron 16y ago
It can, however, make the population of people who have HIV much smaller and slow the spread of it down dramatically.
sliverstorm 16y ago
At the very least, it could buy a second chance for a lot of people, even if it's not all of them. I'm sure there's plenty of people out there who are not career druggies or sluts who had one stupid or unlucky night that is going to ruin the rest of their lives, and could use a second chance. EDIT: sorry, I worded this terribly. What I meant was there are many people who would not catch HIV again, and thus would benefit from a cure to only 91% of HIV. The people who will continue being reckless and catch it again will, of course, not benefit from an antibody protecting them from only 91% of HIV, and that was what I was talking about when I referenced druggies. I'd be more than happy to give hardcore druggies a cure. The whole point was not that some people deserve it and some don't, but that some will gain huge benefits even if it's only 91%, and that is why even though it's not 100% coverage it's still a plus. (of course, not everyone will, because some people will go and catch the other 9% right away, so for them it's not really a benefit, but SOME WILL BENEFIT) EDIT2: to those of you still downvoting, are you trying to say you think every single person on the planet with AIDS would not catch it again if they were cured, but still vulnerable to some strains? That seems kind of unlikely.
- BrandonM 16y ago
  You seem to be implying that "druggies" and "sluts" don't deserve a second chance edit: feel free to re-word it if you like, as long as you leave a note that you edited it.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- halo 16y ago
  >I'm sure there's plenty of people out there who are not career druggies or sluts That reminds me a lot of Good AIDS vs Bad AIDS from the British documentary satire Brass Eye (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFNs2mOkKzc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFNs2mOkKzc)
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
Natsu 16y ago
Yeah, that's why the usual solution is to cobble together a bunch of different 90% solutions until you have something pretty close to a 100% solution. Scientists are going through something similar with fighting wheat rust (which you've probably never heard of, but it'll be an important problem if it gets out of control). The problem with HIV is that every obvious way of attacking it seems to have some kind of drawback that's less than obvious. You can sit around and think up all kinds of hypothetical scenarios for attacking it and find that people have already tried that. And failed.
- lasonrisa 16y ago
  HN can be a very interesting place: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1496772 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1496772 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=158450 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=158450 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=661907 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=661907
  - Natsu 16y ago
    I guess should have known that the people around here would know what wheat rust is. But yeah, that stuff is pretty nasty, as far as its ability to kill wheat goes.

sliverstorm 16y ago

It's really a testament to nature and Darwin's theories that after all the time, effort and money we've been spending on AIDS research, the most successful antibody so far was not created by man, but by his DNA.

bkudria 16y ago
But it was created by a man! Seriously: Is the distinction that relevant?
- hugh3 16y ago
  Well, on one hand, the antibody would have been created whether or not we'd been spending all this money on research. On the other hand, the antibody would never have been noticed if we hadn't been spending all this money on research.
  - sliverstorm 16y ago
    > On the other hand, the antibody would never have been noticed if we hadn't been spending all this money on research. Indeed. But, even though he is a homosexual man, the gene would likely be passed along eventually, and run its course through the human race (if we believe Darwin). We just don't want to wait that long. note: it would be passed one of a few ways: 1) his ancestors also had the gene, and he's not the only one to get it. He has heterosexual relatives who will pass it along, and they simply weren't found for one reason or another. 2) he wavers in his homosexuality, and passes his gene along to a few women OR he is bisexual 3) he donates sperm 4) it happens again in a heterosexual person. This gene arose in something like 30-40 years (I'm not really sure just how many) since the beginning of AIDS, which is an evolutionary blink. I think it's not unreasonable to figure it would arise again, and that it wouldn't take a bajillion years
    - earl 16y ago
      I don't think the gene arose in 40 years. Obviously it didn't, since the man is more than 40 years old. Instead, I think it's a gene that arose via happenstance and is suddenly much more useful.

alanh 16y ago

This is fantastic, but I can only imagine that 91% will become 9.1% within a decade, as the unaffected strains become dominant (just like superbugs).

someone_here 16y ago
But only 10% of the current number of people infected will be infected by that point.
- hugh3 16y ago
  But how many AIDS patients have multiple strains?
  - FiReaNG3L 16y ago
    All of them
    - FiReaNG3L 16y ago
      I love how that got down voted and the general amount of HIV fud in this thread - I actually do HIV research, I would know. Most HIV people get infected by one strain, but it mutates so rapidly that in a single individual, multiple strains co exist at different levels (a major one and many, many lower levels ones).
shasta 16y ago
I doubt that infection with one strain of HIV is preventing infection with another strain, except to the extent that some of the people engaging in the most risky behavior are getting "taken out of the system" by AIDS. Something like this could lead to exponential decline among certain subnetworks of society.
MikeCapone 16y ago
Maybe, but how far forward will biotech have moved in 10 years? Buying time might be enough, in this case.

profitoftruth85 16y ago

I remember reading in "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell how STDs like HIV can be effectively stopped before they become epidemics. If this antibody can be administered and eliminate a large chunk of people with weaker strains of HIV, then assuming the stronger strains of HIV are in the same geographic area, a strong campaign of eliminating HIV spreading behavior in those areas could really reduce the spread of the disease. But like another poster said we don't know which strains are most prevalent, so it could be that a stronger strain is more widespread.

uptown 16y ago
"a strong campaign of eliminating HIV spreading behavior in those areas could really reduce the spread of the disease." That's a LOT easier said than done. There's a widely held belief in parts of the world (such as Africa) that having sex with a virgin cleanses one of AIDS. Because of this, child-rape is extremely prevalent in that part of the world. I suppose you could make the case that education is the easier part of solving the AIDS/HIV puzzle, but it's a very large behavioral problem that can not be solved using a scientific approach.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- profitoftruth85 16y ago
  you have a good point but we have no idea which areas are affected by the antibody. If Africa has a majority of strains that are cured, then I'm sure they could stem the spread of the disease in more developed areas. I don't think that belief is widespread outside of africa, or at least I wasn't aware of it.

rms 16y ago

tokenadult 16y ago

"'We're going to be at this for a while' before any benefit is seen in the clinic, he said." No doubt. It is a first step. Good news if clinical application follows from this finding. As usual, I advise readers unfamiliar with Peter Norvig's article on reading scientific research reports http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html to check that for issues that may not be fully explored by this mass media report.

mmaunder 16y ago

This is great news.

dpritchett 16y ago

So if there's eventually an HIV vaccine that's 91% effective should everyone take it just in case? Even if you never expect to contract HIV this seems like a bit of a Pascal's Wager situation. Why risk it when there's a vaccine available?