The grim warning of what could have been sent the U.S. Department of Defense scrambling to find a feasible means to fight biological warfare. At the forefront of the effort is a team of virologists, biologists and gene experts led by Dr. Stephen Johnston at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. The process is the same that seems to have successfully immunized chimpanzees against AIDS in a study released in the May issue of the journal Nature Medicine by AIDS researchers in Pennsylvania. In that study, two chimps got the vaccine and then a stiff dose of HIV - 250 times the amount needed for infection. It's the first time that a so-called DNA vaccine has squared off against HIV in chimps.
Every pathogen has a unique set of genes, some of which set off ''alarms'' in a host's body.
Those alarms cause the host to create immune responses that will try to destroy the disease or toxin. Johnston theorizes that if the specific gene that triggers the alarm could be separated from the rest of the pathogen, administering the gene to humans would give them the ability to create antibodies to the pathogen. Gene vaccinations offer several improvements over conventional ones. Some traditional immunizations require booster shots. And because with gene vaccinations the whole disease is not administered, the subject will not get ill - another downside to conventional shots, Johnston said.