Focus On The Rainbow

Until Dr. Jonas Salk introduced the Salk vaccine to fight polio, it was a dreaded disease, one which President Franklin Delano Roosevelt suffered from. The 1952 outbreak was the worst in the history of the United States with nearly 58,000 reported cases of which over 3,000 people died and over 21,000 suffered from mild to severe forms of paralysis, most of which affected children.

I remember when I went to Mill Ridge Elementary School here in Danbury, there was a young girl in my class who suffered from polio and had to wear the standard leg braces of the time back in the early 60’s and used crutches to get around. And I remember getting the vaccine shots in school and also the “sugar cube pill” to stave off polio.

Since the discovery and outbreak of HIV in the 80’s there has been the hope that one day a vaccine would be developed to fight HIV infection.

One such vaccine which was tried, but halted in 2007 is the vaccine trial known as “STEP” and on Monday (November 16) a report was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences which attempted to explain why the vaccine failed.

The recent failure of an HIV vaccine was probably caused by the immune system reacting to the virus ’shell’ used to transmit the therapy around the body. The trial, called ‘STEP’, was halted in September 2007 because preliminary results suggested that people who had been given the vaccine were more likely to be infected with HIV than people who had been given a placebo.

The researchers behind this study, from Imperial College London, King’s College London and Royal Holloway, University of London, say their findings mean scientists may have to rethink other vaccines they are developing for diseases like HIV, tuberculosis and malaria, which are delivered in the same way, using the same virus ’shell’.

The vaccine used an adenovirus, which normally causes the common cold, to enable the vaccine therapy to travel around the body. Harmless HIV genes were then inserted into the virus. It was thought that this would help the immune system to learn to recognise and fight off HIV.

This study suggests that after receiving the trial vaccination, people who had previously built up immunity to the adenovirus had an influx of immune cells called CD4 T-cells homing in on their mucous membranes, as these cells prepared to fight off a new adenovirus infection. Mucous membranes are found in areas including the nose, mouth, vagina and gut. HIV naturally infects CD4 T-cells, so this inadvertently provided HIV with an abundance of potential new homes at the sites where the virus would naturally enter the body during sexual intercourse, thereby increasing people’s risk of infection. (source – Medical News Today)

The researchers say their findings are a warning for scientists developing adenovirus vaccines against other diseases, as the same effect occurs with other, perhaps all, adenovirus subtypes.

Another vaccine trial was reported in September of this year as the first to cut infection rates, A trial HIV vaccine that cuts infection rates by almost a third has provided the research community with some hope following years of setbacks.

The vaccine, a combination of two earlier experimental vaccines that had not reduced infection rates individually, is the first to prevent infection. It was given to 16,000 Thai volunteers in the world’s largest HIV/AIDS vaccine trial, carried out by the Thai government and the United States Army.

The male and female volunteers, all HIV negative and aged between 18 and 30, were split into two groups — half were given a placebo, and half given the vaccine. All were provided with condoms and counselling on HIV/AIDS prevention.

Over the course of the trial, 74 people from the placebo group and 51 in the vaccine group became infected. Scientists say the results are statistically significant — with a 31.2 per cent lower risk of infection for the vaccinated group.

“This result is tantalisingly encouraging,” says Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet. “The numbers are small and the difference may have been due to chance, but this finding is the first positive news in the AIDS vaccine field for a decade.” (source – SciDevNet)

And now Dr. Sudhir Paul in association with the Covalent Immunology Foundation is hoping, along with his team of researchers to find the “magic bullet” to guard against HIV as Dr. Jonas Salk did so many years ago to fight polio.

In his bio at the website of CIF it reads, Scientific principles underlying CIF’s mission have been discovered by Dr. Sudhir Paul and his research team at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, and for the last 12 years, at the University of Texas Houston Medical School. Dr. Paul has proved that abzymes are inherently more potent in attaining inactivation of various targets than traditional antibodies with reversible binding activity. Their work on basic science of antibodies and abzymes, HIV, hepatitis C virus infection, Alzheimer’s disease and hemophilia has been covered in over 150 scientific publications. Dr. Paul has been a professor and researcher for over 26 years, and the recipient of numerous federal grants and awards during his distinguished career, much of which has been devoted to developing abzyme technology.

And in CIF’s mission statement, CIF aims to raise funds for research and education that will rapidly translate the hard earned abzyme and covalent vaccination discoveries into medical benefits. CIF will provide funds for timely completion of expensive drug effectiveness and safety studies required by the Food and Drug Administration. It is estimated that drug development costs can be up to 1 billion dollars. For instance, preventative HIV vaccination trials will require a large investment, as a large number of humans must be tested, and their infection status must be monitored for years. CIF’s mission is to enable this process with support from a broad cross-section of the public. In addition, CIF will support Dr. Paul’s efforts to raise additional governmental funds for the research and development.

While the development of a vaccine to fight HIV will be too late for those who have passed due to HIV/AIDS or who are currently infected, it could one day become a great hope for a worldwide halt to HIV. But with the finding of a successfull vaccine it does bring up the quandary of, if there is a vaccine, will gay men go back to the practice of “unsafe sex” ?

That perhaps is a question for another day, as they say, one step at a time.

Below is a video made by celebrities on behalf of the Covalent Immunology Foundation.

This writer nor Hearst Newspapers endorses CIF, the video is provided as an information point.

Covalent Immunology Foundation