US researchers announced they have found two antibodies that may protect against strains of HIV currently circulating worldwide.
The findings, released in the September 4 issue of Science, give reason for cautious hope in the search for an effective vaccine against HIV. After several high profile attempts by major pharmaceutical companies to find a vaccine failed worldwide, this latest news is welcome indeed.
The two immune-system antibodies were found in the blood of an African patient who has HIV. These antibodies are said to isolate a region on HIV that is highly accessible and "conserved", meaning it does not seem to mutate.
Part of the difficulty of finding a vaccine for any virus is that viruses can mutate over time, thereby creating different strains.
A vaccine, it should be noted, is not expected to appear within the next few years. Nor is a vaccine as such a cure. But this news is conspicuous in an area of research that has yielded few major results in recent times.
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