HIV Digest	HIV Digest Archive

At the Cent Gardes international AIDS meeting outside Paris the focus was on the latest work toward building the body's immune system to control HIV without the help of drugs.

Studies of HIV-infected patients showed some signs of resistance when removed from drug therapy for a short time among those whose infection was caught early. Others did not fare nearly as well, but the experiments have given insight into what immune responses are necessary for combating the virus, and how to boost those responses. In fact, short therapy stoppages may even prove to be somewhat helpful to the immune systems among the early detectees, because the resulting increase in HIV in the bloodstream causes a reaction of increase in anti-HIV cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL) white blood cells that remain there after therapy starts again. The same occurs in patients whose detection of the virus was in later stages, but the CTLs seem to be ineffective in combating HIV.

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A possible conclusion is the creation of a stimulus that reproduces the effect of therapy stoppage in the form of a vaccine, but the develo pment of such will not be easy, according to researchers. The only such vaccine in testing at the moment is Remune, marketed by Agouron Pharmaceuticals and Immune Response, based on the research of Jonas Salk. Remune is a whole HIV particle without its infectious abilities, but its effectiveness is not yet conclusive. Remune-backed T-cells fight more strongly against HIV, but they cannot resist it totally. The next step may be to combine the two experiments to find a stronger system than either one is alone.

Editor's Note: from Science