Ruth Ruprecht and colleagues at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Boston have confirmed this fear. Johnson suggests that deleting genes to manipulate the rate of replication may still be an option for live attenuated vaccine development. The team also discovered that this type of antibody is able to remove virus particles rapidly from the blood. Thus, a vaccine capable of inducing quantifiably high levels of neutralizing antibody against HIV could prevent infection. Finally, Kim Hasenkrug and colleagues at the NIH's Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Montana, also present evidence that may improve the design of HIV vaccines and therapies.
Protection requires the stimulation of several types of immune cell.
But a complex mixture of these three types of immune cells was effective in reducing viral load and providing complete protection. Working at the forefront of gene therapy research, a team of Canadian scientists has developed an in utero gene therapy method that may aid neonatal surgery for congenital heart disease. The success of the technique, which could also be applied to other vascular diseases, will fuel the recent debate on the ethics of in utero gene therapy raised by French Anderson. The presence of a special blood vessel called the ductus arteriosus, used by the fetus to bypass non-expanded lungs while in the womb, can aid neonatal surgery. However, this duct closes at birth.