Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2005. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
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United Press International - December 6, 2005
The research, conducted at the AIDS Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles, explains in part why an HIV vaccine is so hard to develop.
Researchers found that the immune systems in two HIV-positive identical twins responded to the infection in different ways, showing that the body's defenses are random, rather than genetically mapped out.
In the study, published in the Dec. 5 issue of the Journal of Virology, researchers followed the cases of male twins who were infected shortly after their 1983 births via blood transfusions from the same donor at the same time.
Although the twins were infected with the same strain of the virus and exposed to the same environmental forces, their T-cell receptors reacted differently.
TCRs typically bind viruses and other antigens to receptors on their surface, but the HIV virus escapes this action by changing shape to elude the receptors.
Researchers noted that the twins' targeting of the HIV virus was remarkably similar 17 years after infection, but their overall TCR characteristics were highly divergent. The finding shows that a "one size fits all" vaccine may not be possible, the study's authors said.
"These boys are as similar as two humans can be, yet we see differences in how they fight the virus," said Paul Krogstad, professor of pediatrics and pharmacology and one of the researchers. "That's one more thing that makes it difficult to develop a vaccine for everyone."
Lead researcher Otto Yang, associate professor of infectious diseases at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, agreed. "If the goal is to develop a vaccine, our findings suggest this may not be so straightforward."
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