Scientists now trying to outflank HIV/AIDS virus

Unsuccessful at developing vaccines that the cause the body’s natural immune system to battle the virus, researchers are testing inserting a gene into the muscle that can cause it to produce protective antibodies against HIV.

The new method worked in mice and now has proved successful in monkeys, too, they reported Sunday in the online edition of the journal Nature Medicine. The team is led by Dr. Philip R. Johnson of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

“We used a leapfrog strategy, bypassing the natural immune system response that was the target of all previous HIV and SIV vaccine candidates,” Johnson said. HIV, or human immunodeficiency virus, causes AIDS in people. The closely related simian virus, or SIV, affects monkeys.

“Some years ago I came to the conclusion that HIV was different from other viruses for which we were trying to develop vaccines and we and might not ever be able to use traditional approaches,” Johnson said in a telephone interview.

He said the researchers knew there were proteins that could neutralize the HIV virus, so they began thinking about whether they could use them to fight the disease.