AIDSWEEKLY Plus; Monday, May 21, 2001
Michael Greer, Staff Medical Writer

NewsRx - An ideal AIDS vaccine might be one that stimulates the cellular immune system so efficiently that, despite repeated exposure to HIV, an individual never shows signs of viremia or even seroconverts against HIV epitopes.

It is still far from clear how to provide anyone this level of protection, but accumulating data from a cohort of at-risk women - sex workers in the AIDS-ravaged community of Nairobi - hint at some of the properties of an immune system that can apparently repel the virus despite ongoing exposure.

Rupert Kaul at the University of Nairobi and the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine at John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, U.K., along with colleagues at those institutions and in Canada, have followed this group for some years, and they have found that persistently seronegative women seem to be protected by a vigorous T-cell-mediated response to infected cells, while those who have seroconverted eventually succumb to the disease.

These authors now report on the HIV epitopes recognized by cytotoxic T lymphocytes from presymptomatic but seropositive women and from persistently seronegative women ("CD8⁺ lymphocytes respond to different HIV epitopes in seronegative and infected subjects," Journal of Clinical Investigation, May 2001).

The authors previously identified several class I MHC alleles that are associated with this protected status, suggesting a genetic basis for the difference in disease progression. Following up on this work, they now show that the protective alleles present a distinct set of HIV epitopes in the two groups of women. Those epitopes that are exclusively or preferentially recognized in persistently seronegative women could provide the basis of a vaccine that can activate T-cell responses that block progression of the disease.

Rupert Kaul can be contacted by e-mail: rupertkaul@hotmail.com.

This article was prepared by AIDS Weekly editors from staff and other reports.

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