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A Trial HIV Vaccine Triggered Elusive and Essential Antibodies in Humans
- chasil 2y ago> Other features of the vaccine were also promising, most notably how the crucial immune cells remained in a state of development that allowed them to continue acquiring mutations, so they could evolve along with the ever-changing virus. As I understand it, somatic hypermutation is a process that only occurs within germinal centers. Is that what is happening here?
- jcims 2y agoAnimation of how HIV infects a single T-cell https://vimeo.com/260291607 https://vimeo.com/260291607
- SixDouble5321 2y agoThis is equal parts amazing and terrifying.
- obloid 2y agoVery interesting, thanks for posting.
- knodi 2y agoWow!
- jcims 2y agoThe music is amazing.
- taf2 2y agoThat is really impressive animation, now I'd love to see this animation updated to include how the Vaccine works
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- gen220 2y agoCan you post this as a new submission? I want to read knowledgeable peoples' responses to it! :) Viruses are incredible. This video does a great job of illustrating how HIV in particular seems to hijack so many essential systems. I now feel like I have a deeper appreciation for why "cures" for viruses are like a holy grail technology – how could you even prevent something like this without collateral damage to some perfectly healthy + necessary process? They're so tangential to how our cells need to work that they're almost parallel.
- jb1991 2y agoHere you go: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40393107 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40393107
- liendolucas 2y agoFor me the most incredible part of the video is the transcription process. Looks like the head of a Turing machine going through the "tape". Really amazing that something like this occurs in the body at a nanometric scale.
- agumonkey 2y agoI was about to say a lisp macro but turing tape works fine too ;)
- op00to 2y agoThis video invokes fear in me. Like, those alien machines (viruses) are doing their weirdo stuff countless times a second in my body. Horrifying.
- Terr_ 2y agoIf it helps, consider that "your body" is the-same-or-more dangerously impressive, with layers of hideously effective defenses to displace or starve or murder anything that gets close, a swarming hive of unfathomable nanotechnology winnowed over millions of years of adversity between the many inheritors of an ancient grey-goo apocalypse. Just from one eldritch hive-mind to another.
- op00to 2y agoI'm not afraid of the viruses per se, I trust in my immune system. It's more the extreme intricacy of the whole damn meatbag. Kinda like looking up at the stars in an ultra-dark environment and seeing more stars than you've ever seen before. I get a little dizzy. Don't get me started on math.
- _Microft 2y agoMaybe you are talking about "awe"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Awe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Awe
- op00to 2y agoYup!
- postalrat 2y agoThat's why I consider biology a type of alien technology that we've been trying to reverse engineer but are still a ways away.
- jiggawatts 2y agoIf math can make you feel awe, you've got to watch the Numberphile series on very big numbers. They're constants used in proofs that are specific, well-defined integers known to be finite, but so huge that the physical universe does not have enough particles (or even Plank-scale microstates) in it to represent the number of digits these numbers have! Absolutely mind-bending stuff. Listed in increasing order: "Graham's Number" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTeJ64KD5cg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTeJ64KD5cg "How Big is Graham's Number? (feat Ron Graham)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuigptwlVHo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuigptwlVHo "The Enormous TREE(3)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3P6DWAwwViU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3P6DWAwwViU "TREE(3) (extra footage)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IihcNa9YAPk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IihcNa9YAPk "The Daddy of Big Numbers (Rayo's Number)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3l0fPHZja8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3l0fPHZja8
- ugh123 2y agoThere should be yearly awards for good science animations and learning tools like this
- surfingdino 2y agoThere is https://www.nikonsmallworld.com/galleries/small-world-in-motion https://www.nikonsmallworld.com/galleries/small-world-in-mot...
- tejohnso 2y agoThe level of detail in the knowledge of the process is astounding. Having never studied anything like this, at every stage I kept thinking: how do we know all of this?
- andylynch 2y agoEasy, thousands of smart, motivated people, billions of dollars invested and decades of work!
- hansoolo 2y agoWatching the video I did indeed feel like "this is insane!" all the way through...
- Angostura 2y agoIf you liked that - this one on the cell’s energy systems blew me away when I first saw it https://youtu.be/LQmTKxI4Wn4?si=7KEKwFjfLrwyCLvW https://youtu.be/LQmTKxI4Wn4?si=7KEKwFjfLrwyCLvW
- jahnu 2y agoThis is amazing. Where do all the free protons come from?
- fennecbutt 2y agoPeople being born and growing up to decide that "this is what I'm gonna do" Also wealthy individuals or companies funding research purely for public good, often with little to no prospect of returns.
- Certhas 2y agoThe vast majority of what we know would be due to public funding. Not private donors.
- fennecbutt 2y ago
- jimbokun 2y agoFeels like a heist movie. Breaking into the cell and hijacking it's machinery to make more of itself.
- noman-land 2y agoReally incredible animation.
- qrian 2y agoI've heard about membrane protein enables interaction with outside molecules that are random walking near the cell membrane, but seeing it as an animation really hit me that that's how things work.
- Angostura 2y agoVery good, but I could do without the ominous music
- bamboozled 2y agoIt's wild to think what goes into making a life happen. It's so alien, and so complex that it's hard to even realize where "the person" starts compared to the rest of the world. That video is just mind bending.
- ezekiel68 2y agoVery promising outcome. But I wonder they/why we are just learning about this now when it seems that the inoculations occurred in 2017?
- giantg2 2y agoIt's not really valuable if the immunity isn't very durable. There are already short duration things like PREP. If it's been 5 years (2019), that's a big deal.
- Traubenfuchs 2y agoThere is a injectable every 2 months solution now. https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-approves-first-injectable-treatment-hiv-pre-exposure-prevention https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-appr...
- giantg2 2y agoYeah, that's why I'm saying years long protection would be a huge shift from the current short term stuff.
- citruscomputing 2y agoI have a friend who takes this; it's very expensive and insurance doesn't want to pay for it, but if you convince them that you're high enough risk ("oh, I just keep finding myself in strangers' beds, I love getting people's blood on me, and I'm just too dumb to remember to take a pill every day"), you can get it. Normal PrEP actually puts you at greater risk if you forget to take it, so I'm really glad that the injectable one is an option. It's much more effective, too. I should see about trying to get on it soon...
- Traubenfuchs 2y ago> oh, I just keep finding myself in strangers' beds Honestly, that‘s why I am taking daily prep. Can‘t trust my urges and I am tired of telling siri to remind me of a HIV test in 4 weeks…
- xutopia 2y agoI am not an immunologist... I don't understand biology very well. How significant is this? Is it even trustworthy?
- BikiniPrince 2y agoThe fact they can trigger antibodies on a stable portion of the virus is impressive. Near the end, it sounds like a multi pronged approach is needed to deal with variations. I’m not an immunologist, but it was pretty light. If they are in trials does that indicate they have a white paper?
- giantg2 2y ago"If they are in trials does that indicate they have a white paper?" I would think they'd have to in order to have the trial. It probably is not for public distribution though.
- heavyset_go 2y agoClinical trial data gets published online, might be able to find what you're looking for.
- carbocation 2y agoDoes this university press release name-check Cell but not link to the article? A bit frustrating.
- safeharbourio 2y agohttps://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2024.04.033 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2024.04.033
- carbocation 2y agoThank you.
- rsingla 2y agoI wonder about the potential for varied immune responses across different populations.
- hi-v-rocknroll 2y agoPerhaps this could be a beneficial prophylaxis. And having another treatment that uses CRISPR to remove the provirus is also an essential to have a durable cure for patients already infected. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-68609297 https://www.bbc.com/news/health-68609297
- dyauspitr 2y agoLook up EBT 101. Human trials started last year for a CRISPR based cure for HIV. This is from the same team that was able to cure SIV in monkeys using the same technique.
- perlgeek 2y agoMy layman, super naive understanding is that an HIV vaccine could also help an HIV-positive person (with a well-managed HIV infection), because it dampens transmission from infected to uninfected cells.
- PakG1 2y agoI'm not an expert on this stuff at all, so assume I'm stupid and ignorant when I write the following. As I understand it, HIV has actually been useful to develop a delivery mechanism for some therapies that have excellent potential. Would this kind of vaccine cause such therapies to become ineffective?
- XorNot 2y agoNo: because the target of vaccines is viral protein coats to prompt antibody binding. The usefulness of HIV for other applications is that some of it's proteins - i.e. the reverse transcriptase - are extremely useful molecular engineering tools, but they're used as individual components. One of the interesting failed COVID vaccine efforts was by the University Of Queensland in Australia which was working on a novel protein based vaccine where the idea was a conformationally locked COVID spike protein was injected[1] - basically it presents the protein as it's found on the surface of the virus, which in turn promotes an antibody response which is "accurate" - whereas free-floating proteins, i.e. if you just shredded up the virus - don't look the same. The problem? The technology was based on a protein sequence called gp41 - which is a subunit of the HIV spike protein. It's not HIV, it's not derived from actual HIV virus - it's made in labs from separately cloned sequences...but unfortunately, part of the immune response to the vaccine generated HIV binding antibodies, similar enough to "real" HIV binding antibodies that they would trip false-positives in HIV tests - i.e. you would test positive to HIV for months, but you didn't actually have HIV - you had antibodies which had enough activity to the common HIV test assay that it looked like you did (e.g. a PCR test for HIV would show you don't have it. But it's impractical to have a whole lot of people who look indistinguishable to the HIV positive population when we had other vaccine options). [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d42473-020-00504-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/d42473-020-00504-2
- ejstronge 2y agoHere is the Cell article: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(24)00459-8 https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(24)00459-8
- croemer 2y agoHow could the press release not link to it shakes head
- nektro 2y agowoah, how exciting!
- croemer 2y agoActual paper is here: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(24)00459-8 https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(24)00459-8 God knows why a press release wouldn't provide a direct link
- bugmenot1k 2y ago[dead]